Around this time in 1989, the sun was setting on the Communist regime in Romania.
Here’s a story of a woman who did something remarkable before that regime fell: she used her voice to bring some of the outside world to the Romanian people.
Irina Nistor worked for Romanian state television in the 1980s.
It was hard times there: there were shortages of food and medicine, while the secret police were watching, and repressing, huge numbers of people.
Along the way, Romanians were getting more and more interested in entertainment from the U.S. and other countries, but not the censored materials the government was playing on state TV.
They wanted the full versions.
A colleague asked Nistor to interpret the English and French dialogue in the original shows into Romanian as they were smuggled into the country.
And she did: after leaving her day job she made her way to a makeshift studio where she would do the interpreting in real time to movies she was watching for the first time.
Sometimes she’d dub eight movies in a single night!
It’s said she dubbed around a thousand of these movies from 1985 to 1989, and that she was the second most recognized voice in Romania, other than the country’s Communist leader.
After the revolution, Irina Nistor became a well-known film critic in Romania.
It was a logical next career choice for someone who’d gone through as many movies as she had.
It was today in 1181 that the people of Weinsberg, in modern-day Germany, agreed to surrender to King Conrad III, who had laid siege to them and had planned to attack.
If you’ve seen the movie “Ever After” you know what comes next.
The story goes that the people agreed to give up their castle, as long as they could take with them whatever the women could carry on their backs.
The king agreed, and the women carried the men away to safety.
The voice that brought Hollywood films to communist Romania’s TV screens (The Guardian)
Medieval warfare : a history by Maurice Hugh Keen
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Photo by startevo, cropped by Ionutzmovie, CC BY 3.0, via Wikicommons
