There is a simple test for evaluating the honesty of an investigative documentary: does it fairly present the facts that contradict its thesis? Twisted Yoga (Apple TV+) fails this test. And in doing so, it denies the viewer the one thing journalism owes them: the privilege of thinking for themselves.
How a narrative is built
I spent years watching how the story of MISA was constructed in the media, and I know – having been on both sides of the story – what a forced narrative looks like. It was April 1, 2004, exactly 22 years ago. I was working as a journalist and had nothing to do with MISA. Someone in the newsroom got a call: turn on Antena 1. It was a live broadcast from the courtyard of the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Bucharest, where a few hundred yoga practitioners had spontaneously gathered to protest. What we saw on television was a few hundred people, all with their hands raised, chanting “No violence! No violence!”. We, my colleagues and I, watched in shock as gendarmes beat the protesters live on air. People were dropping one after another. The gendarmes were kicking them, hitting them with batons. I remember someone even called a friend and told them to watch “how the gendarmes are beating the yogis live.”
The next day, every single newspaper, without exception, wrote about the violence caused by the yoga practitioners.
I saw what happened with my own eyes, and I read what was written. I asked my more experienced colleagues how this was possible. They explained: you build a narrative by choosing what enters the frame and what is left out. That was when I understood how media reality is constructed. Twenty-two years later, Twisted Yoga relies on exactly the same mechanism. The difference is that it does so under the claim of investigative journalism.
Communist-era files presented as evidence
Episode 3 of Twisted Yoga presents accusations against Gregorian Bivolaru from the communist period as proof that a long chain of criminal behavior began back then. “Later on, he was actually convicted to prison because he owned and distributed pornographic materials. He was not jailed because he was a yoga practitioner. This is what we see from the files,” says Andreea Pocotilă in the documentary. She also states: “But now, years after, we can actually look up in these files and see what really happened.”
She is right that the files are public. The problem is how they are read.
In his analysis of the CNSAS archives, the researcher Gabriel Andreescu points out a crucial issue: the documents of the Securitate are not objective truth, but rather the products of a repressive apparatus that must be interpreted critically. The language of these files does not describe reality, it constructs it.
These files are, in fact, constructed naratives. As the research shows, they create coherence through repetition and internal confirmation: the same story appears across different sources, reinforcing itself. This is not a neutral accumulation of facts, but a narrative that validates itself.
Moreover, the Securitate operated within its own interpretive “framework”, a standard scheme used to identify “enemies of socialism.” Reality was not discovered; it was forced into this framework.
In 1989, Gregorian Bivolaru was incarcerated in a hospital that used psychiatric abuse. He was going to be brainwashed. He was saved by the Revolution. He was released from the psychiatric hospital at the end of 1989.
The language that produces guilt
This ideological framework becomes visible in the language itself. It is not the language of a neutral investigation, but of an apparatus that produces guilt before establishing facts.
As Gabriel Andreescu shows in Repression of the Yoga Movement in the 1980s (Polirom, 2008), accusations are formulated in a recognizably ideological register, combining labels such as “mystical-obscurantist materials,” “obscurantist-obscene activities,” or “initiation into erotic psychology.” These are not precise legal terms, but formulas meant to force reality into a predefined ideological frame.
Within this logic, any spiritual practice could be reinterpreted as a threat: “under the cover of religious activities, they carry out actions hostile to the state.” This is not a description of reality, but the result of ideological framing.
More than that, these files are not produced in a neutral environment. They emerge in a context of pressure and violence: “threats, beatings, mistreatment and torture” and their narratives are reinforced by sources that confirm one another. For this reason, as the research emphasizes, they cannot be taken at face value; they require a critical evaluation of the context in which they were produced.
At the same time, the same analysis shows that what is labeled as deviance was, in fact, part of a broader phenomenon: the development of an “alternative culture to that promoted by the official apparatus.” Seen in this context, these practices no longer appear as crimes, but as forms of expression that fell outside the ideological patterns of the regime and for that very reason were perceived as dangerous.
The documentary adopts this language without explaining it. It treats it as fact.
What courts and research say
When these same files were analyzed in court or in academic research, the conclusions were different.
The court established the political nature of the convictions. In Civil Sentence no. 1271/01.07.2011, the Bucharest Tribunal examined these files under Law 221/2009 concerning politically motivated convictions. The conclusion was clear: the sanctions from 1977, 1984, and the psychiatric internment in 1989 were political in nature. This was not about punishing criminal acts, but about sanctioning behavior perceived as deviant from the ideology of the communist regime.
Andreescu’s research goes further. One of the most rigorous scholars of the CNSAS archives, he describes the phenomenon as part of a broader dynamic of repression and stigmatization.
The documentary adopts the terminology of the Securitate files without filtering it, including the accusation of “pornographic materials.” In MISA: Radiography of a Repression (Polirom, 2013), Andreescu shows that this term did not have its usual meaning, but was used in a specific Securitate sense, capable of designating almost any form of nudity or erotic material, including in spiritual contexts. In other words, it did not describe a legal reality, but a tool for incrimination. How would it sound today to think you could be arrested for having a Playboy magazine at home?
As for the psychiatric internment, Andreescu is equally direct: it was “one of the methods of exterminating political dissidents,” a systematic tool, not an objective medical evaluation.
An editorial choice
Perhaps the most important point Andreescu makes about this period, and one that appears nowhere in the documentary, is that Gregorian Bivolaru’s group became, after seven years of harassment and repression, “the only example of sustained collective resistance under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime.” This is the conclusion of an independent researcher who studied the Securitate archives.
Twisted Yoga ignores both the court ruling and Andreescu’s published work. The documentary presents these convictions as proof of a criminal profile that would precede and explain later behavior, even though they were instruments of political repression.
None of these dimensions appear in the documentary. Nothing about how these files must be read, the violent context in which they were produced, the ideological language of the accusations, or the conclusions of independent research.
This is not a minor omission. It is an editorial choice.
And it fundamentally changes the meaning of the narrative: instead of a man politically persecuted by a totalitarian regime, who resisted for years and whose convictions were officially recognized as political, the viewer is presented with a prelude to a series of more serious acts, a supposed pattern of behavior.
Who tells the story
Two Romanian journalists are part of the documentary team, with different roles: Andreea Pocotilă and Andra Samoilă.
Andreea Pocotilă appears on camera and constructs the narrative around the Securitate files, presenting her reading of the CNSAS archives as a neutral investigation. In the documentary’s trailer, a sequence later removed from the film but still present in the trailer, she claims to have studied and researched the MISA story for many years. Verifiably, however, her only prior material on the subject is an article published in Vice in July 2018, reportedly based on information provided by a third party, not on her own investigation. Between a single article and “years of research” lies a significant omission the documentary does not address.
More importantly, Gregorian Bivolaru has been in detention in France since November 2023. A request for an interview, a visit, or even written correspondence are standard steps in any serious journalistic investigation that places someone at the center of accusations. The Global Charter of Ethics for Journalists of the International Federation of Journalists explicitly states that urgency cannot take precedence over “the right of reply.” The documentary makes no visible attempt to obtain one.
This absence is not a minor editorial omission. It changes the nature of the documentary, from investigation to indictment.
“Before the documentary, I was quite ignorant”
Andra Samoilă worked as a fixer and local producer for the British production company LightBox. In an article published after the release, she describes the working process in a way that reveals more than it likely intends: “for me, the information provided by the production team in London mattered a lot, I read it cover to cover, as well as the way they included me in the content development process.”
She also stated on her personal Facebook page that before working on the documentary she did not know much about the subject: “I was quite ignorant,” “Bivolaru is a name known by many Romanians. We like to make fun of him,” and described the project as “a brilliant story” she embraced.
This is not a statement of independent journalism. In other words: she was given a pre-constructed angle and worked within it.
Samoilă also filmed with a drone above a MISA event in Costinești in August 2025, an incident that led to police intervention after MISA complained about the filming. Her public account presents it as a successful journalistic adventure: “the British producers were very pleased with the footage.” What is not mentioned is that, according to sources familiar with the incident, the drone authorization was merely a request submitted, not a permit granted. A few seconds of that footage appear in the trailer.
An investigative documentary has an obligation to show what contradicts its thesis. This is not a matter of interpretation, but of facts.
Communist-era convictions were officially recognized by a Romanian court as political. Yoga practices were analyzed by independent researchers as part of a form of cultural resistance. The psychiatric internment of 1989 fits a known pattern of repression against dissidents.
None of this appears in the documentary.
What is missing is not just context. It is the part that changes the meaning of the story.
And when you remove from the frame exactly those facts that could challenge the narrative, you are no longer investigating reality. You are editing it.
Sources
- Gabriel Andreescu, Reprimarea mișcării yoga în anii ’80, Polirom, 2008
- Civil Sentence no. 1271/01.07.2011, Bucharest Tribunal – Civil Section II
- Gabriel Andreescu, MISA: Radiografia unei represiuni, Polirom, 2013
- Episode 3 transcript, Twisted Yoga (Apple TV+, 2026)
- republica.ro, “Andra Samoilă: How it was to work for Apple TV on the documentary about Bivolaru and MISA”
- Andra Samoilă’s personal Facebook page
FAQ – Twisted Yoga, MISA, and the case of Gregorian Bivolaru
Q: In the documentary Twisted Yoga, are the communist-era convictions of Gregorian Bivolaru presented considering the court ruling?
A: A Romanian court determined that these convictions were political in nature.
In Civil Sentence no. 1271/01.07.2011, the Bucharest Tribunal concluded that the sanctions from 1977, 1984, and the psychiatric internment in 1989 were not for ordinary criminal offenses but were politically motivated. This legal conclusion is essential for understanding the case in context.
Q: How are the Securitate files used in Twisted Yoga, and how reliable are they as sources?
A: They require critical interpretation and cannot be treated as objective evidence.
These documents were produced by a repressive system and reflect a specific ideological framework. Research shows they construct narratives through internal confirmation and use language that frames reality rather than neutrally describing it.
Q: What do the studies of Gabriel Andreescu say about MISA and Gregorian Bivolaru compared to the portrayal in Twisted Yoga?
A: They provide a historically contextualized interpretation.
Gabriel Andreescu shows that the MISA phenomenon can be understood within the broader context of communist repression and describes Gregorian Bivolaru’s group as part of a form of collective resistance. This perspective complements interpretations based solely on archival sources.
Q: How should the 1989 psychiatric internment of Gregorian Bivolaru be understood in the context of Twisted Yoga?
A: It should be analyzed within the political practices of the communist regime.
During that period, psychiatric internment could be used as a tool to control or silence individuals considered problematic. This context is important when interpreting such cases beyond a strict medical perspective.
Q: What relevant aspects of the MISA case and Gregorian Bivolaru are not fully detailed in Twisted Yoga?
A: Some key legal and academic context is not fully presented.
These include the court’s ruling on the political nature of the convictions, the need for critical interpretation of Securitate files, and the conclusions of independent academic research. These elements can significantly influence how the case is understood.