SAHIA VINTAGE is a digital history platform of documentary films produced at the Alexandru Sahia studio in socialist Romania between 1950 and 1990. As part of a broader public history project, the platform makes accessible to the public the studio’s rich film heritage and puts it into conversation with the lived experience of the people.
Launched in 2013, this is the longest-running independent project in Romania focused on an audiovisual archive and the institutional context that created it. The project began with a series of annual archival screenings as part of the One World Romania festival in Bucharest, and continued between 2014 and 2019 with the release of five themed DVD compilations curated from the Sahia archive. In 2016, we began to take these films into high schools and neighbourhoods across Bucharest and beyond, where they were screened alongside introductory presentations and Q&A sessions.
In 2019, we began developing the SAHIA VINTAGE platform as an evolving resource that is being regularly expanded with the addition of new sections based on documentary and archival research, and oral history interviews. Currently, the platform is composed of two sections: one dedicated to the documentary films produced by the studio (which was developed between 2019 and 2022) and another focused on the studio’s newsreels (developed between May and December 2024). The launch of the newsreel section in 2024 marks 50 years since the discontinuation of the studio’s newsreel production in April 1974. Both sections of the platform include selections of clips from films and newsreels, each accompanied by a brief commentary.
The expansion of the platform to include this second section dedicated to the newsreels produced between 1950 and 1974 is part of our long-term vision for the platform as a multimedia monograph of the Alexandru Sahia studio as the only documentary studio of socialist Romania. We are developing this platform to be accessible to both specialists and the general public, with the goal of broadening the range of factual representations tied to the lived experience of socialism and offering a more nuanced perspective on its complex and often contentious memorialization. Over the coming years, we will continue to expand the platform’s content, incorporating other relevant outputs of the studio.
We have included the term ‘vintage’ in the title of our project to note the increased intensity of our relationship with the past in the present of the 2000s. As the temporal distance between the present and the period referenced by these films continues to widen, two intertwined forms of nostalgia emerge: one for the past itself, and another for the media and technology of that past. This dual nostalgia shapes how we relate with this material; we must be mindful of how we experience and manage it.
Navigation on the platform is from the MENU button (bottom left corner). All text is bilingual (Romanian-English) and all clips come with English subtitles (CC, bottom right in the player).
