Of the many enemies dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu had, Cold Waves focuses on the one he feared most: Radio Free Europe (RFE) – the one medium for dissent that he could not control. In a story of international espionage, suspicion, deceit and murder, Alexandru Solomon directs a film which gets at the heart of the often understated tensions during the Cold War. America was to be the victor, but the complex issues that took place in Romania before the fall of Communism are part of this chilling, and at times awkward, documentary.

The complications of portraying the phenomenon of Radio Free Europe are adopted as a creative principle: rather than resisting the intangibility of the medium, the film’s visual structure aspires to resemble it. The postmodern narrative form is both alien to and nurtured by the nature of the radio: the interviewees frequently speak from a very tight frame, with a background that is hard to decipher. Often the interview seems to be taken in a setting closely resembling a black metal box.

Certain points of the film are frequently illustrated by the use of dummies positioned in rooms designed to be an exaggeration of the typical Romanian home during that era. The effect the Cold War was having on ordinary people is thus demonstrated through inanimate figures, sitting in a kitchen, listening to strange, comparative statistics about the percentage of meat in traditional dishes during the Second World War and in the 1980s. These kitchens and bedrooms with their lifeless mannequins, lit with dirty, urban light, are almost a parody of the familiar Soviet posters, with healthy, brightly dressed peasants striding across abundant fields.

At one point in the film, it is said that Communist Romania ‘does not need a metaphor’, as the pervasion of Radio Free Europe is as intangible, mysterious and pregnant with meaning. The irony is that ordinary people have television sets, apartments, but no rights. As the camera pans across a city-scape of dimly lit tower blocks, criss-crossed with aerials and satellite dishes, Solomon captures precisely the nature of invisibility, of fighting (or embracing) something you cannot see.

Cold Waves is the first documentary on this topic to unite the views of both sides: RFE personnel, ex-government workers, the families of those who died working for RFE and ordinary people whose lives were affected by the conflict. It is a story of good and evil, with an important point: ‘you could be fighting for the right cause and still be embroiled in a dirty war’. Indeed, the contradictions that arose when Romanians fought their own governments in favour of the US are more apparent now when America has shown that its actions rarely are in the interests of the countries its culture or armed forces invade.

The issue of responsibility arises time and again, as several Romanians who’d worked for RFE died from mysterious radioactive poisoning. Clearly there was something suspicious going on, but the answers were not apparent in the 1980s and early 1990s; their deaths only make sense in hindsight. Images of Alexander Litvinenko, as he lay bald and dying in hospital, are shown against a commentary which details America’s extensions of radio stations ostensibly ‘for the people’ in to other countries such as Iraq. RFE never takes responsibility for the deaths of the three men, their families are never compensated and there is never any closure.

At ninety minutes, and spanning such a huge area in recent political history, Cold Waves sometimes lacks emotional intensity. The plethora of different names and faces emphasises the fact that the story is viewed from so many perspectives, but in the end it is difficult to remember who’s who and what they were saying. This is compensated by some darkly amusing episodes, such as when a journalist reports being stalked in the street and stabbed in the head. He decides to write a report about the incident, takes a picture and has it printed in his paper. The image is of him with a bandage around his head, gazing bug-eyed into the camera. The juxtaposition between his appearance in the film and his appearance then is funny, but the laughter in the audience was suppressed. The same happens when the voice behind the camera points out logical inconsistencies in the actions of an ex-general; he stutters, stumbles, looks surprised, opens his palms and says: ‘I was only following orders!’.