HARLEQUINADE
When the young student Victoria Darian is invited for questioning to the secret police headquarters she decides to kill herself rather than face the ordeal of the interrogation. It is 1984, the peak of terror in Ceausescu’s communist Romania and everyone lives in fear of Securitate, the dictator’s ruthless henchmen. Victoria’s parents were destroyed in the interrogation dungeons of the feared institution. Her mother, Lia Darian, was a theatre actress and her father, George Darian, a cabinetmaker and a dissident against the dictatorship.
This is how the story begins, a story about people without dreams or hopes, struggling to survive in a world where they are not humans but numbers on files in the vast library of Securitate. It is a story about the inherent evil in man which prevails and strives in an environment where human values are neglected and degraded. But it is also a story about the glimmer of light in every one of us and the power of love and friendship. Harlequinade tells a tale about a forgotten world - tragic and cruel - and the people who were caught in its toxic whirlwind - some were reduced to ashes and some were reborn.
