This PhD project focuses on the study of censorship as a socio-political process, revealing the individual and institutional logics that conjugate in the process of filmmaking. The research analyzes the period 1965-1989, which is the "Nicolae Ceauşescu era", remarkable for the amount of censored films.In conducting my research, I dedicated the first part of the work to the analysis of the Romanian cinematography organization, considered in the political, social and economic context, from the 2nd World War until the fall of the Communist regime. Particular attention is paid here to the evolution of culture control institutions and to the discourses, especially those of the Communist Party leaders, which shape the standards of the film production. In order to understand various possible forms of censorship, I then approached an intermediate level of analysis, that of institutions. Thus, I identified and analyzed several structures such as production studios, the Filmmakers’ Association, Radio Free Europe and the political police, whose censorial functions varied from guidance to repression.In the last part of this work, I looked into filmmakers’ biographies and important films of the period. I chose to analyze the trajectories of the period’s most representative filmmakers through the lenses of their surveillance files made by the political police. The Securitate monitored them because they shared a "non-compliant" vision of the socialist reality; while doing so, the political police revealed what was acceptable or undesirable in that reality. Finally, in order to illustrate how censorship affects films, I propose the analysis of some notorious cases of banned film, but also of films that exemplify various taboos, detailed forms of intervention or reactions of the filmmakers to any kind of pressure. Choosing censorship as a main angle of analysis is useful for the comprehension of the filmmakers’ constraints, servitudes and liberties, but also the understanding of contradictions, of what is made visible or kept silently hidden by the regime.