Alongside the regular (weekly) newsreel, the Sahia studio also produced various other types of newsreels aimed at specific audience groups. Periodicals such as The Pioneer (after a Soviet model), Sport in pictures, and News from agriculture were all launched in the 1950s, and were followed later (1966) by the popular science newsreel Scientific horizon.
The Agricultural newsreel was produced under different names at various points in the studio’s history, going from Towards a socialist agriculture (1950-1954), to News from agriculture (until the start of the 60s), and to Images for our villages (until 1974). Conceived as an informative and educational monthly release, the agricultural newsreel covered exclusively rural Romania (through material filmed by the Sahia crews) and the Soviet Bloc countries (through material obtained following exchanges with other national newsreels from the region).
The quarterly children’s periodical The Pioneer (Pionierul) covers topics related to the Pioneers socialist youth organization. For example: in Pionierul nr 6/1961, a group of soviet school students visit a school in the capital, a group of Cuban kids are given a tour around the Children’s Palace (Bucharest), pioneers in Brasov help the authorities recycle paper and scrap metal, and a group of schoolkids from Cluj pay a visit to the Botanical Gardens. Both the agricultural and the pioneer newsreels are closely scrutinised by the national press, often criticised for their coverage of allegedly minor and frivolous issues, and urged to adopt a stronger educational approach to their content.
This section dedicated to the periodicals produced by the Sahia studio, is a new addition to our platform (launched Nov. 2024). We have only included a small sample of stories selected from the pioneer and the agricultural newsreels, in order to give a sense of the potential of these types of filmed material as research resources. Mapping a larger sample of periodicals produced by the studio into a more comprehensive section of the platform is a task that will require further research in the future.