Coming after a major 2024 with the U.S. release of his blistering satire Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (which nabbed a spot in our top 10) and the premiere of a pair of smaller-scale, experimental films, Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude is gearing up for quite a 2025. His forthcoming Dracula film will arrive before year’s end, but first Kontinental ’25 will make its world premiere in competition at the 2025 Berlinale. The film, debuting next Wednesday, starts with a sheriff’s bailey making a disastrous attempt to evict an old man from an abandoned building and follows her through an exploration of what it means to be both a Romanian and a European in 2025. Ahead of the premiere, we’re delighted to exclusively premiere the first poster.
Radu Jude tells us of the poster design, “We consider the poster to be a part of the mise-en-scene of the film, and we created it in the same spirit in which the film is made: low-budget, DIY. More than the film itself, the poster pays homage to Europe ’51 by Roberto Rossellini––the film that inspired us to make ours.”
Here’s the synopsis: “Cluj, Transylvania. After being driven from his shelter in a house cellar, a homeless man commits suicide. Orsolya, the bailiff who carried out the eviction, is impelled to make various attempts to address her feelings of guilt. Using a mixture of drama and comedy, topics as diverse as the housing crisis, post-socialist economics, nationalism and the power of language to maintain social status are dissected with a sharp, absurdist scalpel, in a movie-literate narrative that plays partly as a homage to Rossellini’s Europa ’51––not least in the modesty of this independent, low-budget production’s means. But while in Rossellini’s film a woman’s crisis of conscience leads to meaningful activity, here the protagonist facing the dilemma is unable to find anybody to understand her and becomes increasingly desperate for external reassurance and validation, in a manner that would be easy to condemn if Orsolya’s moral relativism were not such an uncomfortably accurate reflection of a modern-day malaise from which few of us are wholly immune.”
See the exclusive poster premiere below, along with a recent conversation with Martin Scorsese in which he sang the praises of Jude, saying, “He’s something else. Especially Aferim!, which he shot in black and white, and another one that I’m sure isn’t to everyone’s taste, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. That one is shocking––it takes political content, cinema, morality, immorality, throws it all on screen, then shatters it into a thousand pieces, and suddenly, you see the world differently.”
