Filmul documentar ca instrument în cercetarea antropologică

Judging by the accounts of the village elders, the custom “The Lads” has only undergone few changes in time, due to social circumstances. The young men start getting together from the very beginning of the Nativity Fast, as always, and rehearse the same carols they learned from the elders, except for the one they sing in church, which must be a different one every year. The number and age range of the young men have also been kept constant throughout the years, as has the performance of the ritual. However, in some years there were as much as three groups of lads, each from a different hamlet. Because musicians are expensive and due to the low number of young men, there was only one team of lads in 2015. Until about 20 years ago, the people receiving the lads in their homes would give them food such as sausages or a smoked pork leg and liquor for the celebration marking the end of the carolling, called ‘conac’ (Romanian for ‘manor’). The fact that the lads stopped receiving food from the villagers led to the disappearance of one of the team members, namely the one who used to carry all the food in bags and who was called ‘the horse’. Another change undergone by the custom is the removal of the tallest lad’s role of dancing with the eldest woman in the household so that the hemp should grow tall. Ever since the cultivation of this source of textile fiber was banned, this role has vanished from the lads’ team. The leader of the lads is called the ’taroste’ and the rule dictates that, unlike all the other team members, who are unmarried, he must be a married man. He is selected freely by the lads, who owe him obedience throughout the three ritual days. He plays an important part not only in coordinating the team, but also in making sure the lads keep up the pace, as they have a long distance to cover on foot in a short interval.