"Universal history is nothing more than the recurrence of catastrophes in the expectation of one final catastrophe." - E.M.Cioran

The film brings the viewer to Cioran’s home in Paris, walks along with him to his favourite places, and records his recollections of a “lost Paradise”, his place of birth in a village near Sibiu, where he never returned. We meet Cioran the philosopher and Cioran the man, profound and explosively humorous, shortly before his departure from this world. The film is narrated by the outstanding Romanian philosopher Gabriel Liiceanu.

“I cared for my donkey more than for my own man and kids. But now it's dead. If I had a donkey now, I would live like a Member of Parliament.” concludes Turica, one of the main characters in the film. She and her relatives wander from village to village, carrying on their backs huge bundles of handmade brooms and baskets, which they try to trade for food.

The filmmaker follows this extremely poor Gypsy family in their survival winter trips. With a cine-verite camera style, the film goes beyond all Gypsy stereotype. We see real people coping with the absurd or the tragicomic situations in their everyday life. A remarkable photography, together with the very rich oral tradition of the character brings us in a world whose existence is almost inconceivable to most of us.

The people in Izbuc, a village in the Romanian Carpatian mountains, believe their fellow villager Gratian Florea to be a werewolf. According to an old custom, when a child is born, the midwifes call upon the spirits, to make the child hard working, beautiful, loveable or wise. It is said that when Gratian was born, the umbilical cord broke only after the midwife called forth the werewolf. This crucial moment was to influence his whole life. His family and the whole village rejected him. At 73, Gratian lives in a shack outside the village, without water of heating.

Every saturday Gratian goes into the village to beg for the food he needs for the following week. The saying goes, that those who refused to give him something will have their sheep eaten by wolves after a few days. In his solitude, Gratian works with astronomical numbers. He says that his thoughts about belief, moral values, and eternal life will help him discover infinity. He sees himself as a traveler into the universe, who at a certain time will surpass the wordly existence and the essesnce of his sould will become equal to God.

The film explores the life of an extremely poor family, living in a village in northeast Romania. The parents have made incredible efforts to send all ten of their children to school. Five of them have even made it to the university in the city. The film focuses on Mihai, one of their sons. After less than one year of study, Mihai had to give up Theological School. He chose to return to the village and help his family work the tiny plot of land they own. Because he plans to return to the university next year, he uses every spare moment to study for his exams. He talks about his short experience in the city, and about the marginalization of the students of rural origin. Daily routine is interrupted by the occasional conflicts with his overworked mother. However, there are also the little joys of the household, such as when a calf is born or the goslings hatch. A film about the destiny of a young man who is caught between two worlds.

In October 1966 Nicolae Ceauşescu was signing Decree no. 770, through which abortions were forbidden to Romanian women, under the penalty of jail; the only women who were legally entitled to have an abortion were the ones over 40 or those who had at least 4 children in care.

For the Dictator, the decree was the birth certificate of the New Man, obtained through racial and ethnical purification. In reality, Ceauşescu symbolically signed his own death conviction;”after a quarter of a century, he was going to be killed by the children born at his own command”.

Born on command is in the first place a film that fights against forgetting and repeating the mistakes of the past.

One of the bridges across the river Tisa has a long and complicated story: the bridge between Sighet and Slatina. Sighet is a small town in the north of Romania, close to the Romanian-Ukrainian border, and Slatina the neighbouring town on the Ukrainian bank of the Tisa.

This bridge has been build during the Austrian-Hungarian empire and destroyed shortly before the end of the Second World War.

A whole web of family, cultural and economic ties was destroyed after this war. The northern bank of the river became part of the Soviet Union while the southern bank continued to be Romanian. The river Tisa separated the two towns for more than fifty years.