Banned after being shown for only a few days at the time of its original release, this long-unavailable work by the well known stage director Lucian Pintilie has been described by Mira and Antonin Liehm as "one of the pinnacles of European cinema during the '60s." Two drunken young men, celebrating their graduation from high school, have caused a row in a tavern, wounding a waiter. Now, in front of an audience which includes the investigating judge, an obsequious local constable, and the servile waiter, the youths re-enact the incident for an "educational" film warning of their bad example. Egged on by their elders, who keep encouraging them to "be more realistic," the boys reconstruct the scene of the fracas-until one of them is killed. In their definitive book The Most Important Art: East European Film After 1945, the Liehms go on to describe The Re-enactment as not so much a tragedy, but "tragic confusion strongly colored by elements of black humor in the tradition of Gogol and Swift. It is the story of collective irresponsibility, an allegory about cowardice and indifference, an allegory absolutely uncompromising in its moral criticism."