Romania’s irreverent maverick Radu Jude returns for another off-the-wall savaging of the ills of modern Europe, this time with the villainy of an unaffordable rental system in his sights.
At once incisive and ambiguous, it’s proof that Jude is operating on a completely different level than most of his contemporaries.
Kontinental ‘25 2025
Radu Jude is now recognised as Romania’s most outrageous and biting satirist, after a string of inventive, anarchic films crammed with wild incident and nods to other texts, that take aim at society’s historical amnesia and the indignities of modern-day capitalism. In his latest pitch-black, merciless comedy, which was shot on an iPhone in just ten days and won raves at the Berlin International Film Festival, he reckons with the greed and hypocrisy that have fuelled the European Union’s housing crisis, and the chasm of inequality that was ushered in with the post-socialist transition to capitalism.
Orsolya, a bailiff, is called to evict a homeless man from the dingy cellar where he had been squatting, in the city of Cluj, in Transylvania. His suicide leaves her plagued by guilt – and grasping at external validation and reassurance by any means necessary to free her of any sense of complicity in the death. The title of the film is a play on the Roberto Rossellini movie which inspired it, Europe ’51, in which a callous and neglectful industrialist’s wife turns to humanitarian work with the poor after a personal tragedy. — Carmen Gray