Abstract

The oil crisis at the end of the 1970s and, soon after, the sovereign debt crisis of socialist Romania had a huge impact on the domestic cultural system—mainly through austerity mechanisms of cutting production costs and increasing minimal mandatory revenues. One effect was the reshaping of cultural exports and exchanges on new, market-oriented bases, meant to also support the economic reorientation towards the Global South. In this article, I intend to follow the way the Romanian communist regime used culture, in general, and particularly international film production and distribution as a tool for advancing not so much propaganda purposes, but prosaically more commercial ones. The article also shows how the contextual landscape led to a lack of consistency and efficiency in both the economic and propaganda efforts.