I heard about this movie and at first I wasn’t very excited because the person forgot to tell me it was a documentary. I just imagined it was a new movie with Chuck Norris fighting the bad guys of Communism – which, now that I really think about it, would have been a cool movie to watch.

Eventually, I found out it was a documentary. Chuck Norris vs Communism is about the way western cinema transformed the way Romanians thought about the world. The illegal movies were smuggled into the country and people had clandestine film nights in their living rooms. Since TVs cost almost the price of a car (50,000 lei!), the impact of having media not controlled by the government was monumental and long lasting to those who had the opportunity to experience it. The documentary explores the effects of these films (dubbed by the mysterious Irina Nistor) on the population of a country controlled by a strict dictatorship and a paranoid government.