Watched with great interest by the AFF 2017 cinephile audience, the documentary is an emotional chronicle of Sibiu, which travels through time, showcasing the thriving moments, but also the great turning points that the city upon Cibin River has crossed from the beginning to present day, along the nine centuries of evolution.

The unprecedented moments of the city’s history in the heart of Transylvania are portrayed in 26 intense minutes: the sieges that have tested the very existence of the city, the bubonic plague, the former mayor of Sibiu and local Transylvanian Saxon ruler, Johan Sachs von Harteneck’s Great Square decapitation, but also the effects of the Enlightenment Movement and the Josephine reforms in the Habsburg period. The original music score is composed by the Evangelical’s Church organist in Sibiu, Brita Falch Leutert, and is based on the theme of a 13th century song, discovered on a music sheet from an old church book.

The aerial frames of the mountains surrounding the city, the picturesque villages on the outskirts of the fortified churches, where the villagers withdrawn in the event of an attack, pictures of the Upper City’s hip streets, the vents of rooftops as ancestral eyes watching, combine perfectly with fragments of classical music and the narrated story of the city and builds a remarkable cinematic experience, an audio-visual metamorphosis of Sibiu.

“I tried to include in this film slices of Sibiu’s history, a city that has always kept up with history or sometimes went ahead of it. I’ve tried to showcase a Transylvanian urban experience, a unique story with flourishing or bad periods in which the European spirit of the city lasted more than nine centuries and inspired what we see today, an important cultural and tourist center” said Dumitru Budrala, the film director.