UID:
kobvindex_ZLB15719494
Format:
1 DVD-Video (100 Min.)
,
Stereo
,
4:3
Content:
"It's a chilling reminder of the grimness of life in Ceausescu's Romania that this delightfully silly fairy-tale spoof was banned until after the dictator's fall. To be sure, the secret weapon invented by the film's tyrannical emperor̶likelier to wreak havoc on his subjects than on any enemies̶smacks a bit of Ceausescu's cruelly wrong-headed scheme for paying off his nation's foreign debt. And some of the emperor's ringing declarations̶"I'll destroy all the museums and libraries; that's what it means to be the strongest in the world!"̶would doubtless have elicted smiles of bitter familiarity among Romanian filmgoers in 1988. Western viewers unfamiliar until recently with the painful details of life in one of the planet's hellholes will nonetheless have trouble appreciating the Pythonesque inventiveness of this sumptuously mounted romp, surely the only film ever to imagine a Trojan Duck. Sadly, The Secret of the Secret Weapon was the last completed film of Alexandru Tatos (b. 1937), who succumbed to lung cancer in January 1990, just after the fall of the dictator he so loathed. The Festival dedicates these screenings to the memory of this courageous filmmaker, still little known in the West, whose talent, intransigence, tenderness and lucidity will be sorely missed." (San Francisco International Film Festival)
Note:
Ländercode: 0
,
Orig.: SR Rumänien, 1988
,
Engl., franz., dt. und span. Untertitel
Language:
Romanian
