A young boy is adopted by a priest and his wife during the Nazi occupation of Romania during the Second World War. He befriends the village idiot, who's despised by everyone else. When a German is killed in the last days of the war, the village is threatened with total destruction unless the murderer is handed over. The villagers decide to hand over the idiot.
Acting
Amza Pellea's idiot will break your heart
Direction
Nicolaescu builds dread through silence
Writing
The dinner scene: civility masking barbarism

Director
Sergiu Nicolaescu
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Banned briefly in Romania for showing peasants as moral cowards rather than resistance heroes. The regime preferred partisan myths.
Amza Pellea, Romania's most beloved comedian, played the idiot so devastatingly that audiences couldn't look at him the same way again.
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