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ALEX MIRONESCU (b. 1987) is a filmmaker, journalist and broadcasting media producer. He worked as TV Anchor, Editor-in-Chief and Broadcasting Media Producer for TV channels. He did exclusive interviews with Metallica, Nelly Furtado, Juanes, Roberto Cavalli, and international coverages on Berlinale IFF or Milan Fashion Week for his own show Red Carpet with Alex Mironescu. He has an M.A. in Advertising and P.R. Campaigns Strategy from University of Bucharest and is currently studying Film Direction at the National University of Theatre and Film "I.L. Caragiale" in Bucharest. An admirer of Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier’s films, he has previously directed the short documentary film IULIAN. A TRUE STORY (2014) and the short fiction film TRUE ROMANCE (2014). He is currently co-writing his first independent feature length film.
By the time credits roll, THE GOLDEN DREAM’s prophecy of Romania in the year 2000 as a bastion for socialism, has already come and gone. An utterly thought-provoking piece of audio-visual dialectics, Mironescu’s film cleverly manipulates footage of the Nuremberg Rally. Hitler is removed from the source material and replaced with the figure of an unknown dictator, lip-synching one of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s speeches. In so doing, he echoes Walter Benjamin’s famous decree that "the logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life". Breaking down the symbolic signifiers of fascism ingrained in the collective subconscious, the film knowingly employs the highly aestheticized imagery of power but removes its emblematic source. Pantomiming Hitler’s well-known gesticulations, the stand-in extends the subversion by mouthing Ceauşescu’s speech, exalting the citizenry and its victorious efforts to fulfil "mankind’s golden dream of Communism". Yet deprived of its original visual pathos, the film’s soundtrack is combined in a dialectic newspeak of Orwellian gravitas. What we’re left with is a biting satire of the power of propaganda aesthetics that, courtesy of our contemporary hindsight and its distancing effect, allows individual thought to break away and reflect (or dream?) on its own. (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF)