Radu Jude

Radu Jude strikes again, taking his title from words spoken at a Romanian government meeting in 1941, a few months before the army helped murder tens of thousands of Jews in Odessa. Now a theatre director wants to restage that massacre in a Bucharest car park, and the city would rather she didn’t. — In Bucharest, the theatre director Mariana is preparing a public re-enactment of a massacre committed by the Romanian army on the Eastern Front. She means to show what her country did quite literally, and once the people around her grasp just how literally, the protests begin. — Best Film | Karlovy Vary International Film Festival | 2018 Europa Cinemas Award | Karlovy Vary International Film Festival | 2018

Radu Jude adapts a novel by Max Blecher, who died at 28, and this time he shoots on 35mm with a camera that stays still. At a Black Sea sanatorium in 1937, young bodies wither in plaster corsets, but the patients still drink, make love and dance while fascism rises outside the window. — Emanuel is a young man with tuberculosis of the spine, and at a Romanian sanatorium before the war he is put in plaster from his neck to his hips. For months he won’t get up from the wheeled stretcher he lies on. All around him the other patients eat, drink, quarrel and fall in love, though their bodies keep failing them, and soon Emanuel’s own heart starts beating faster.

Nobody films today’s Europe like Radu Jude, who is both provocateur and scholar. He borrowed his title from Stanisław Jerzy Lec and cut a Romanian classic into the film to deliver a merciless takedown of modern consumerism, a world where old cinema and TikTok go arm in arm. — Angela, a production assistant in present-day Bucharest, has been up since four in the morning. A corporation has ordered a film about safety at work, and she spends the whole day driving around the city to film auditions with workers who were injured on the job and are supposed to tell their own stories. The company, though, has its own ideas about how those stories should go. — Special Jury Prize | Locarno Film Festival | 2023

Radu Jude (“Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World”) won the Silver Bear for Best Director in Berlin for this Eastern European western, shot in black and white with almost every line lifted from documents of the period. It’s very funny and very uncomfortable. — In Wallachia in 1835, a boyar hires Costandin, an ageing constable, to track down a runaway Roma slave. Costandin takes his teenage son along, and the two ride from village to village, frightening peasants and drinking with monks and gold panners, until they find the runaway in a hut and put him in chains. — Best Director | Berlin International Film Festival | 2015 Nominated for Best European Screenwriter | European Film Awards | 2015