Secret videos of movies from the west were a solace for many under Nicolae Ceausescu’s rule – and Irina Margareta Nistor dubbed 1,000 of them

In the last years of communist rule in Romania, which came to a bloody end 25 years ago this December, an underground trade in bootleg foreign movies allowed a glimpse into life in the west.

VHS tapes were smuggled into Romania by pilots, cargo ship workers and lorry drivers, some of the few Romanians allowed to travel abroad regularly, then copied, sold and passed around in secret. Nearly all were dubbed by a single voice, a young female translator from Romanian state television. Some have labelled her the most well-known voice in communist Romania after Nicolae Ceausescu, yet at the time no one knew her identity.

“My family didn’t have a video player so we would gather at my neighbours’ on the first floor and binge-watch these movies, maybe 20 people at a time,” said Gabriel Dobre, a journalist in his 30s. “It was always the same lady speaking in place of Van Damme, Schwarzenegger.”

Speaking in her home in Bucharest, 57-year-old Irina Margareta Nistor said she had no idea of the impact she was having. “I was just watching and dubbing the films, I didn’t really know what was happening afterwards,” she said. “From time to time people would say ‘I’ve heard you’ but I didn’t know people were gathering in blocks of apartments to watch, selling tickets.”

After graduating in foreign languages in 1980, Nistor worked for Romanian national television. In 1985 she was approached by a colleague who asked if she would be interested in dubbing foreign films. She was introduced to another man, and after passing a test-run – Dr Zhivago – she began dubbing nearly all the smuggled movies from French and English to Romanian.

Nistor estimates she dubbed more than 1,000 movies in the four years between 1985 and the revolution, sometimes as many as eight a day. She would do her official job from 8.30am to 3.30pm, censoring content for television broadcast, and then walk two blocks to the man’s apartment to dub films until midnight in an improvised studio in his basement. Since there wasn’t time to watch the movies first, she had to dub them in real time on first viewing.

This was happening at a time when the average Romanian was living in fear of the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, and its network of informers – roughly one in every 30 Romanians. “I can’t say that I wasn’t afraid, but for me I was just seeing the films and dubbing them,” she said.

It was tough for her family. “My parents and grandmother knew. I was 28, so there was no question of them saying no,” she said. “My mum was proud, I think – she wouldn’t have liked to have a coward daughter – but she was afraid.”

For most Romanians, the films were a gateway to the outside world. They were able to glimpse people’s lives in the west by watching movies from the 70s and 80s including Taxi Driver and The Godfather, the works of Woody Allen, and action films starring Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone.

“I grew up in Romania in the 1980s. My first film experiences I owe to Irina,” said Ilinca Calugareanu, a London-based Romanian film-maker who is in post-production on a documentary titled Chuck Norris vs Communism, which focuses on Nistor and that period in Romanian history. “When I met Irina at a film festival in 2011 the memories all came back to me. Her voice. I realised it was an amazing story.” The documentary will premier at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

The late 80s in Romania were a time of food and medicine shortages and repression. Nistor believes the authorities knew what the film dubbers were doing, but let them continue as a way to distract people. “I think people were so unhappy at that time that the state left them a little bit alone; like a pressure valve, otherwise they would have stopped us the next day. But I didn’t realise this at that time.

“I didn’t know people even in the countryside were watching. I heard after the revolution that the national theatre in Craiova, in order to get funds because they couldn’t get money from the state to pay salaries, they were organising cinema nights.”

Since the end of communism in Romania in 1989 Nistor has become a well-known film critic in her home country and in 2012 helped to launch a film festival in Bucharest. But for people of a certain generation her voice will always take them back to the final years of the oppressive communist regime.

“I’m completely amazed people are still remembering after almost 30 years,” said Nistor, surrounded by shelves filled with books and DVDs. “It is interesting listening to people talk about the impact of those films, hearing people say it made their lives a little bit better during those years.”