Moldova is a beautiful country, what with its beautiful landscapes and vinyards - or at least it could be, if it hadn't fallen into the hands of oligarch's after the fall of the Soviet Union, oligarchs that pretty much served themselves from the get-go while suffocating the populace with a overboarding bureaucracy that in turn led to a system of rampant bribes. But shit started to hit the fan when these oligarchs stole €1 billion from the gouvernment funds, money badly needed to save the floundering economy. But after that, the elite got a little cautious because one man, opposition leader Mihai (Dragos Scutelnicu), wouldn't have it anymore and plans a revolution. Not that the gouvernment takes him all that seriously, but still they hire a couple of specialists from the US - after all it's in the US's interest to have stable autocrats installed rather than replaced for feeble one. The two US agents are young and somewhat idealistic hacker Preston (Tommy Dickie) and shady veteran Uncle Jerry (Shawn Law). And with a strategy based on fake news and social media they try to sway the situation. There's two things though that our Americans don't know, one that their interpreter Anastacia (Lia Sinchevici) is secretly working for the other side, and two that Mihai might be the figurehead of the revolution but not the mastermind - and that would be Olga (Irina Rusu), a high ranking gouvernment official who knows everything there is to know about the system, has access to all sorts of official stamps, and now uses the country's bureaucracy against the very people who have trusted this system will forever support them ...

First and foremost, this is not based on actual historical events (so much so that it anticipates a revolution that only happened a few months after the shoot) but rather an epic satire on the political conditions inside the country and how they may lead/might be used to its downfall. But to the film's credit, it was actually filmed in Moldova, when the oligarchs were still in power. But even without all this backstory, Stampila is a very cool film, as despite being about specifically Moldovan conditions, a country I admittedly know very little about, the story feels universal and thus relatable, the direction is elegant and makes perfect use of its locations, and the cast's solid to bring across the clever script rather beautifully, all making this into a movie not to be missed.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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