FILM REVIEW: DIAMONDS IN THE DARK, BY OLIVIA LUCIA CARRESCIA, FIRST 


RUN/IcARUS FILMS, 2000, 60 MINUTES 

Joel Marrant, Linfield College 

In 1993, Yvette Biro described the geographical 
and psychological terrain portrayed in Eastern 
European cinema as "a landscape after battle". 
Such is the Romania depicted in New York 
filmmaker Olivia Lucia Carrescia's recent 
documentary Diamonds in the Dark, an 
insightful study of the devastation wrought by 
the Ceausescu regime and the problems faced in 
the period of transformation since its fall. As she 
has done in previous productions about 
Guatemalan immigrants to the US, Carrescia has 
chosen in 

Diamonds to illuminate textures of human 
experience rather than attempt to make cinematic 
sense in less than an hour of a highly complex 
and even chaotic reality. In ternlS of Biro's sadly 
appropriate metaphor, the effect is something 
like meeting casualties returning from the front. 
Some are bloodied and bandaged, others intact 
and hopeful, all moving past with tired eyes and 
worn faces revealing and concealing to varying 
degrees the experience of war in the trenches. All 
are survivors of a struggle that has not ended but 
just shifted theatres. 

The eyes and the faces are exclusively 
female, more than a dozen women of diverse 
social and economic backgrounds who reflect on 
life under Ceausescu's pseudo-communism and 
the decade of crypto-democracy that has 
followed. Their words vividly convey the 
madness of the man, his wife, and their regime, 
the huge costs they exacted from a people to 
whom history has never been kind, and the 
mixture of confusion, disillusionment, and 
guarded optimism that has followed the 1989 
Revolution. Carrescia's primary goal was to 
make a film about Romanian women and the 
lives they have forged and are forging for 
thell1Selves under tremendously challenging 
conditions. In this she has succeeded admirably. 
Rural peasants, urban professionals, factory 
workers, and others speak of what they had to 
endure during the Communist era: the brutally 
enforced pro natalist policies; the crushing 
material deprivation; the Party' s distortion of 
language and truth; the daily humiliation of 
queuing to buy bread, to bribe, to grapple \Vith 

bureaucracy. The varying responses of the 
women to such experiences defy our American 
inclination to line up all ducks in an 
ideologically seamless row, eliminate grays, and 
find at all costs a solution to the problems of 
history. Romanian history, as Mircea Eliade has 
argued, is a "terror" that is endured rather than 
resolved, the scourge of reason and the happy 
ending-- be it concocted by Marxist utopians, 
Disney enthusiasts or \Vide-eyed venture 
capitalists. 

To represent the terror, Carrescia does 
not overload the viewer with the now-familiar 
images of orphanages, street children, and 
tenements. Rather, she effectively juxtaposes 
archival shots of a demoralized and 
impoverished population with surrealistic 
footage depicting aparatchik and fresh-faced 
Pioneers singing the praises of wholly 
illegitimate leaders. These, in turn, are 
contrasted with contemporary images of revived 

Romanian cities, the beautiful Romanian 
countryside, and the women at work and home 
with their families. The narrative line is minimal 
and jumps freely between past and present, sub­
regions and speakers. Clearer identification of 
the latter might have helped viewers to sort 
things out and see the close connections between 
individual biographies and overarching social 
forces. But Carrescia's intention is not to provide 
an objective socio-political history of Romania 
but rather to lay bare some of its fundamental 
problems and contradictions past and present and 
arrive at issues of universal significance: the 
difficulties of forging genuine social change and 
democracy, the control ideology can have over 
the mind, what constitutes human freedom. 
These issues are illuminated by quotations from 
the Croat journalist Slavenka Draculic, one of 
the earliest feminist critics of the communist 
system in Eastern Europe. They help to stitch 
together the words and ideas presented by the 
Romanian women who have, like Drakulic, 
struggled with and survived a dehumanizing 
system, and yet face enormous challenges ahead. 

A Baia Mare factory worker in her 
forties intimates with a chilling pragmatism her 

\'01. 19, No.1. Spring 2001, Page: 153 



decision to induce one or two miscarriages a year 
by techniques undetectable by gYllecologists. 
(Periodical "checks" for pregnancy and illegal 
terminations of pregnancy were mandatory after 
the 1966 anti-abortion decree outlawing all 
forms of contraception.) Her words are 
juxtaposed with those of a Pentecostalist, among 
the most persecuted of populations under 
Ceausescu, speaking proudly of following her 
faith's directive to produce "as many children as 
God will give us." Bearing fourteen offspring 
earned this dedicated enemy of the godless 
communist state a medal as a "Socialist 
Heroine"-- just another contradiction wrapped 
inside the larger paradox of a Socialist Republic 
that was neither socialist nor republican. Others 
talk of the double shift borne by women working 
on collective farms, who also recall the benefits 
of full employment, cheap housing, and free 
education under the Ceausescus. The "very good 
life" experienced then in the relatively few 
noncollectivized villages is described by a Bixad 
peasant, who says they "had everything they 
needed." A retired schoolteacher uses the same 
phrase about the present situation, though she 
laments the fact that inadequate pensions require 
her and her husband to work harder now. These 
and other contradictions are not sorted out in the 
film, but left to the viewer to gnaw on and digest. 

Underlying the varied experiences of 
past and present is a common sensitivity derived 
from the subjects' identity as women who 
overcame the Communist regime's relentless war 
upon human relationships. "Pre-Revolutionary" 
Romania was a society in which private 
interpersonal ties provided virtually the only 
dimension on which female social identities 
could be constructed. Carrescia speaks bluntly 
and accurately of Romania as a patriarchal nation 
where women have historically played no public 
role, and traditional social institutions radically 
restricted their gaining of political power. Yet 
the communist regime boasted of an 
"egalitarian" system in which bourgeois sexism 
had beenjettisoned, and women shared power 
with males. The reality, of course, was quite 
different. Everyone knew that the public women 
of Romania, with one brilliant exception, were 
forced to be vapid and powerless place-holders, 
Communist bimboane. It was as if "Mother 
Elena" had sucked all of the potential power for 
Romanian women into her own bloated ego, 
leaving only a desiccated and insubstantial shell 
for others. 

Traditionally restricted to the realm of human 
relationships, principally family, as the primary 
source of self-identity, women in Romania were 
particularly vulnerable to a political regime that 
sought to devalue and undermine interpersonal 
ties. The women's comments about this assault 
on their humanity bring the true horror of two 
decades under Ceausescu into focus. Life was so 
very difficult, they repeat over and over, because 
the daily struggle to stay warm, fmd enough food 
to eat, keep body and soul together, resulted in 
what anthropologist Katherine Verdery has 
called "the erosion of sociability." People were 
forced to isolate themselves from each other, to 
"atomize." The universe of authentic 
engagement was constrained within the tiny 
kitchens of tenement apartments where, if one 
turned up the radio volume and spoke softly 
enough with the few friends and family members 
you really trusted, you could express what was 
really in your heart. Developing anything like a 
public perspective on the world, a practice of 
civil engagement, or bonds relating women to 
each other, was a lUXury that only very few could 
afford, or a risk that even fewer dared to take. 

One of the latter plays a key role in 
Diamonds in the Dark: Tea Luca, the long-time 
Director and Chief Curator of the Museum of Art 
Collections. Speaking in French, Luca tells of 
her dangerous tightrope walking without a net 
over the state's official policies on culture and 
aesthetics. Since the first few years after the fall 
of the Ceausescus, however, she has largely 
withdrawn from the political arena. Other 
women, including Dr. Lucia Briscan and 
Madalina Nicolaescu, a university professor, 
have moved into the front lines of a still 
embryonic women's movement in Romania. 
Perhaps one of the most important insights of the 
film is that women's rights there since 1989 have 
not so much advanced or regressed, as moved 
sideways. In the words of Lucia Briscan, women 
in Romania have become publicly "invisible" 
since the revolution. While politically expedient 
bimboane have disappeared from the public eye, 
patriarchal structures have acted to keep 
authentic leaders such as Briscan from stepping 
into positions of genuine political power. The 
film, however, offers evidence of alternative 
power-building going on. Nicolaescu is shown 
teaching a class on feminist theory, and NGOs 
such as the ProEurope League, which Briscan 
serves as head of the Women's Department, are 
depicted as providing pathways for community 
development and consciousness-raising outside 

Vol. 19, No. 1. Spring 2001, Page: 154 



traditional structures. Looming large, ho\veyer, 
are sharp generational and urban-rural lines that 
inhibit the free flow of information and the 
making of common cause. The degree to which 
feminist grass roots efforts and the ProEurope 
League can help to consolidate a power base for 
women in Romania also depends on macro-level 
forces the film does not address: the post­
revolutionary government's ability to forestall a 
descent into economic chaos, the threat of a 
neocommunist resurgence, and the whims of EU 
ministers. The dominant ethos in Romania, 
moreover, remains a self-interested concern with 
survival for oneself and one's 0\\11. with a gap 
widening between those few who are flourishing 
in the "jungle economy" and those being slowly 
strangled by the vines of a modern and 
unfamiliar capitalism. In the face of the 
challenge, a withdrawal from the warfare of 
public policy into the safe confmes of affIrming 
personal relationships is held out as a reasonable 
option. Perhaps the most disorienting voice in 
the entire film is that of a retired state filmmaker, 
wearing a headscarf of ambiguous symbolism, 
who asks rhetorically, "Why would women ever 
want to get involved in that dirty world of 
politics anyway, with its turmoil and struggles, 
battles and plots? Why ride the tumultuous wave 
that buffets you when you can just sink beneath 
the waves and breathe easily'?" 

Diamonds in the Dark does not aim to 
answer questions about what 
socialism/communism was or what comes next, 
or the problems of political economy in this 
"transformational" era in Eastern Europe. Rather 
than sorting out the unsortable, the film shows 
viewers the tangled mess of a failed experiment 
in social engineering and invites debate, 
comparison, and deeper investigation into its 
implications. The title alone is worth several 
hours of discussion. Carrescia derives it from a 
comment by a Bucharest translator who survived 
Ceausescu's regime by turning inward and 
reading voraciously. She refers to a phrase in one 
of Arthur Miller's plays, "it is dark here but full 
of diamonds", and suggests that this captures for 
her the experience oflife in her native country. 
The words call to mind Polish filmmaker 
Andrzej Wajdas Ashes and Diamonds, and the 
metaphor of Poland as a phoenix, or even the 
Jesus Christ of nations, rising again and again 
from the smoldering rubble ofhisrory. The 
young woman's image conveys the more human 
scale of the Romanians' experience as victims of 
history. Ceausescu portrayed himself as a 

brilliant sun god bringing "luminosity" to the 
people of his country, who in reality labored in 
mines lit only here and there by 40-watt bulbs. 
Olivia Carrescia's courageous film reveals the 
diamonds who provided the real source of 
illumination in the darkness, and their potential 
to shine when exposed to full and authentic 
sunlight. 

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