The Golden Age of the title is the horrific final 15 years of the Ceausescu regime in Romania.

Written by Cristian Mungiu, this portmanteau film has five stories, each helmed by a different but unnamed Romanian director, which comment on the surreal and comic urban myths of the time - most of which are substantially true.

It is not revealed who directed which episode, but it seems likely, judging by the more sombre style, that Mungiu himself made The Legend of the Chicken Driver.

This has Vlad Ivanov (the abortionist of the director's Palme d'Or-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) as a truck driver transporting a load of chickens across the country.

The vehicle is sealed and, because of food shortages and the likelihood of theft, he is forbidden to stop except briefly for a meal. A blonde hotel manager, however, persuades him to err.

Jiri Menzel, the Czech director, might have made The Legend of the Official Visit, in which a smalltown mayor prepares to receive an official motorcade by placing fake fruit on barren trees and ordering wild, flag-waving enthusiasm from the locals. But the motorcade, of course, never arrives and everyone gets drunk.

If this is both funny and charming, The Legend of the Party Photographer shows the Ceausescu regime at its most ludicrous.

The editors at Scinteia, the Communist Party organ, desperately try to doctor a photograph that has France's President Giscard d'Estaing looking taller than the dictator. Should they take off Giscard's hat or put one on Ceausescu?

All this will be familiar to those who remember the Eastern European ironic comedies of yore. But it is still great fun and, through comedy, spears an awful regime with undeniable accuracy while pointing up the indomitability of the ordinary people who suffered Ceausescu until his surprising end.