‘Master: Radu Jude’

Part of the second generation of the filmmakers that have come to define the New Romanian Cinema, Radu Jude has quickly become one of the country’s most prolific and important directors. Unfaltering in his continuing exploration of film language and the cinematic representation of history, he’s directed over ten short and feature length works in just as many years, and received awards at all major international film festivals (Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, Rotterdam).

His breakout film The Tube With a Hat (2006) made history as the first Romanian film to be selected at Sundance, where it won the award for Best Short Film and announced him as a filmmaker of striking sensitivity to observing the ties that bind human relationships. The follow-up feature films The Happiest Girl in the World (Berlin 2009) and Everybody in Our Family (Berlin 2012) established him as a director interested to mold the slice-of-life naturalist realism of New Romanian Cinema to his own imprint of deadpan humour and empathy.

The year 2015 marks a decisive turning point in his filmography and a moral and ethical signpost in his thematic and formal concerns. His Silver Bear winner Aferim! saw Radu Jude explore the formal structure of the western genre, delivering a contemporary historical (anti)epic that revisited 19th century Wallachia and Romania’s history of racial injustice towards its roma population. The investigation of Romania’s relationship with its own history would become an ongoing theme in Radu Jude’s work, producing fiction, documentary and essay films, culminating with his latest work, the 2018 Grand Prix winner at Karlovy Vary Film Festival, I do not care if we go down in history as barbarians.

The increasingly political and formally experimental quality of his films reflects the organic and natural growth of a director restlessly challenging the comforts of narrative storytelling and its inherent formal accountability. Described by Film Comment’s Jonathan Romney as “one of the most intriguing stylistic experimenters in contemporary Euro-fiction,” Radu Jude remains unwavering in his cinematic search for new means of critical expression in the way we negotiate our distant and immediate pasts – without losing one’s sly sense of humour, of course.