On the 20th of December, 1989, a few days after Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s bloody repression in Timisoara, a father’s quiet evening turns to sheer terror, as he finds out that his little son has mailed a letter with his wish-list to Santa. As far as the child understood, his father’s desire was to see Ceausescu dead.
“Thirty years have passed since the Revolution, and I hope the film helps raise some questions regarding the freedom of expression, personal dignity and other such concepts that have become demonized or simply devoid of meaning. In my opinion, not enough films have been made about this period in our history (or at least not in a realistic manner) and I believe that now, more than ever, we need them—to temper nostalgic, uninformed or simply politically disoriented people, and to retrieve some of the questions, even if we cannot always give the right answers. The Christmas Gift is not just about the past. There is a dose of absurdity within the social experiment of communism in Romania, which makes it quite contemporary and universal. This absurdity, characteristic of certain types of social organization where the power is held by a madman might just be something recurrent.”
