Once ''the Paris of the East'', Bucharest in 1989 is a world of danger, repression and corruption, but also of intensity and ravaged beauty.

As Ceausescu''s demolition squads race to destroy the old city and replace it with a sinister Stalinist Legoland, its inhabitants live out communism''s dying days not knowing how or where things will end.

In ''The Last Hundred Days'' a young English student arrives in Bucharest to take up a job he never applied for and whose duties are never made clear.

He finds dissidents, party apparatchiks, black-marketeers, diplomats, spies and ordinary Romanians, all watching each other as Europe''s most paranoid regime plays out its bloody endgame.