"I do not care if we go down in history as barbarians." These words, spoken in the Council of Ministers of the summer of 1941, started the ethnic cleansing on the Eastern Front. The film attempts to comment on this statement.

Synopsis
military reenactment – Hannah Arendt – show – 1941, "the year that keeps returning", as seen from 2018 – quotations – firearms – archive footage – the Odessa massacre – 16 mm and video – the Military Museum – negationism – videomapping – burlesque – dialogues – fanfare – Isaac Babel – fragmented narrative – Wenn die Soldaten durch die Stadt marschieren – trivialization by comparison – script by Marshal Antonescu – fire – direc ted by Radu Jude – featuring Ioana Iacob, Alexandru Dabija, Alex Bogdan – barracks jokes – ordinary people - nunca más! – the present past, the past present.

Director's statement
Thinking about our dark history makes one look back with the horrified gaze of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, whose "face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

A Hi Film (Romania) production in co-production with Endorfilm (Czech Republic), Les Films D’ici (France), Klas Film (Bulgaria), Komplizen Film (Germany), ZDF/Arte, TVR with the support of Romanian Film Centre, Czech Film Fund, L’aide Aux Cinémas du Monde, Centre National du Cinéma et de l’image Animée - Institut Francais, Bulgarian National Film Center and Eurimages.