BUCHAREST It was a red carpet reception befitting a major head of state and Romania's official photographers were out in force as dictator Nicolae Ceausescu welcomed the visiting French president.

But when Ceausescu's Communist Party officials examined the pictures, they were aghast their revered leader appeared short compared to France's Valery Giscard d'Estaing.

Worse - while Giscard was wearing a hat, Ceausescu was carrying his, and aides thought it made him look like he was begging.

The images were doctored for the official party daily, adding a few extra centimetres to Ceausescu and putting a hat on his head. Except no one thought to airbrush out the headgear in his hands.

When the mistake was spotted, police were sent across the country charged with securing every copy of the paper and its front-page image of the despot with two hats.

The date is March 1979. Welcome to life in Ceausescu's Romania.

Twenty years after the collapse of his brutal regime, tales such as the hat episode have been revived in a new film by acclaimed director Cristian Mungiu that pokes fun at the absurdities of life in communist-era Romania.

Mungiu - the darling of Cannes two years ago when he took the festival's coveted Palme d'Or - recalls what made people laugh even as they suffocated under Ceausescu's autocratic leadership.

It's the flip side of “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” his grim story of a woman trying to procure an illegal abortion under the same regime, which took Cannes by storm.

This new compilation of six short films by young directors, called “Tales from the Golden Age”, has comic plots that range from an exploding Christmas pig to the contradictions of toeing the party line.

In its satire it recalls the 2003 German film “Goodbye Lenin”, another look-back-and-laugh film in which a devoted son attempts to hide the collapse of the Berlin Wall after his party stalwart mother wakes up from a coma.

“Tales from the Golden Age”, part of the official selection at Cannes in May, borrows the phrase used by Ceausescu's propaganda chiefs to describe his Romania, and is the second in a trilogy that opened with “4 Months”.

But don't expect a nostalgic trip back in time.

“What this film does is try to bring back the humour that helped us survive through that period,” Mungiu, 41, told AFP.

When he began work on the trilogy, “the plan was to start with the stories people used to tell while standing in line for hours to buy God knows what.

“But then I realised it gave the wrong idea about the system.”

Hence “4 Months” came first, but while “Tales from the Golden Age” invites its audience to laugh, Mungiu said it wasn't his intention to portray a more benign version of daily life under communism.“It's a different point of view,” he said. “After all, I started by dealing with the dark side of that period.”

The stories in “Tales” were directed by Mungiu, based on his own screenplay, and four other directors - Ioana Uricaru, Hanno Hoefer, Razvan Marculescu and Constantin Popescu - seen as the new generation of Romanian cinema.

In one, a couple buy a pig on the black market just before Christmas, but are at a loss how to slaughter it in their apartment without their neighbours finding out.

They decide to gas it - only for the hog to explode in their faces.

Life under Ceausescu was grim. Food shortages were severe and there were frequent power blackouts.

Queues were a daily chore, even for basics such as bread and milk. People would wake up at dead of night just to join a line in front of a shop if they heard something - anything - had been delivered the previous evening.

“Everybody should see this movie, and most of all the young people, or else they may believe those who say communism was good,” said Silviu Mandache, 72, outside a Bucharest cinema.

“There was no food, we had to queue up for everything. And then there were the lies about what was going on in the country,” he added.

Andrei, 23, said the film brought familiar tales to life. “My grandparents used to tell me stories like these ones, so it was quite funny to see them on screen.”

Ceausescu ruled Romania with an iron rod from 1965 until his execution at the age of 71 on Christmas Day, 1989, after a popular revolution.

“To youngsters, this is just a comedy,” Mungiu explained, “to adults it's like a trigger of memories.—AFP