The regime of Nicolae Ceausescu continues to appear as an indelible stain in Romania’s recent history, and it feeds the country’s fiction cinema. In “Cadoul De Craciun”, the director Bogdan Muresanu masterfully portrays, with black humour, the collective paranoia fuelled by repression and surveillance through a small familiar episode in the last days of the dictatorship. On the eve of the dictator’s bloobeginningdy repression in the town of Timisoara, which marked the of the end of the regime, and a few days before Christmas, the innocence of a child endangers the whole family when a man discovers that his son has sent a letter to Santa Claus asking as a gift that Santa would make his father’s wish come true: to see Ceausescu dead. This short film marks the debut of Bogdan Muresanu in Curtas Vila do Conde. (MD)