| Marin Iorda | |
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 Iorda c. 1937 | |
| Born | Marin Iordache 30 August 1901 Bucharest, Kingdom of Romania |
| Died | 23 June 1972 (aged 70) Bucharest, Socialist Republic of Romania |
| Area(s) | Writer, Artist |
| Pseudonym(s) | Moș Martin |
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| Spouse(s) | Ecaterina Iorda |
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Marin Iorda, pen name of Marin Iordache (30 August 1901 – 23 June 1972), was a Romanian visual artist, writer, filmmaker, and theatrical director. His beginnings were as a teen-aged cartoonist, employed on Constantin Costa-Foru's magazine for youth. Specializing in line art and graphic design, then formalizing his training with courses at the Art Academy, he spent the early interwar years as a regular at various cultural magazines in Bucharest. From 1919, Iorda was also promoted and educated by the writer, cartoonist and theater producer Victor Ion Popa, who inspired him to take up stage design; they functioned for decades as a two-man team, with Iorda as the less conspicuous one. As part of his more independent ventures, in 1924 he partnered with another writer, Nicolae Constantin Batzaria, in creating a comic strip for children, called Haplea. It was highly successful, inspiring Iorda to also draw, animate and produce a 1927 Haplea film, which is the first-ever feature-length Romanian cartoon. He followed up in live action, with the 1928 silent film Așa e viața, enlisting Jean Georgescu as his aide.
From about 1930 to the 1957, Iorda was mainly employed as a stage director, dramaturge, and producer. During the early 1930s, he was in Brașov, where he founded a directed a children's theater; during his stint there, he also took up wood engraving and became noted as a glider operator for an experimental airmail service. After his theater failed, he turned to work for Radio Bucharest, writing and producing a string of radioplays, as well as directing its children's programming, and also served as editor in chief at the children's edition of Dimineața daily. Iorda's credentials as a leftist were established at around the same time, when he published novellas for grownups, noted for their anti-elitist and anti-capitalist messages; on the cusp of World War II, he was also briefly a pacifist activist.
Iorda's services were still used by the authoritarian regime formed around King Carol II and the National Renaissance Front in 1938. He returned as editor of Curentul's children's paper, and as writer of Romania's first graphic novel, which included praise of Carol. He and Popa ran the Workers' Theater on Uranus Hill, working under direct supervision by the Ministry of Labor. They were thus allowed to entertain the proletarian masses, though prevented from engaging in radical politics—a status which was also maintained throughout Ion Antonescu's Nazi-aligned dictatorship, down to 1944. During their cohabitation with the latter regime, Iorda and Popa also worked with each other on a police procedural, which was only partly filmed in 1942–1943. Upon Antonescu's fall in August 1944, Romania experienced a leftist turn, allowing the Uranus-Hill Theater to reemerge as an institution for the promotion of socialist aesthetics; also working as director for the National Theater Bucharest, Iorda reemerged as an ally of the Romanian Communist Party, and in 1945 published what may have been Romania's first socialist-realist epic.
In September 1947, Iorda was assigned by his friend Ion Pas, the titular Minister of Arts, as manager of the National Theater Iași. During his tenure, the Kingdom of Romania was formally ended, and a communist regime was proclaimed in its stead. In September 1948, Iorda was reassigned to the National Theater Craiova; while there, he embraced Marxism-Leninism and Stanislavski's system, applying both to the reinterpretation of works by classics such as Ion Luca Caragiale and Nicolae Filimon. Collaborating with various theatrical venues across the country, he was reassigned as a regular director at the Workers' Theater, and later the Bucharest Youth Theater. During his final decade, he had a comeback as a cartoonist: relaunching Haplea alongside writer Tudor Mușatescu, in a "re-educated" version, he also presented his lifelong drawings in various art shows.