Students listening to lecturers carefully, were not satisfied. Jude heard: “You are easy to say that, you have numerous successes on your account, it is relatively easy to find a budget for your next projects.” Another student, bolder and more barked, shouted: “If it’s so easy, please make a movie with your cell phone yourselfwe’ll see if it’s so simple. ”
And Jude did it. He wanted to prove something to students, viewers, but above all to himself. Ten days of implementation, mobile phone as a camera, budget of zero Romanian lei. The contract was such that if the project succeeds, the film will go to theaters, the director and actors would share profits. And it worked, surprisingly.
Movie “KTODINENTAL ’25” He was first chosen for the competition, and then Awarded with a silver bear at the Berlin festival. It started. “CTINENTAL 25” has gained great reviews and, like the recent advice of the council, went on a triumphant journey around cinema halls in Europe and in the world. Now he goes to Polish cinemas.
I warn you: it’s still old, good Jude. The blade of irony was measured this time towards the Patodeweloperka and the devastating poorest war capitalism. Transylvania is like Tirana, like Wałbrzych or Bratislava. Everywhere, in fact, similar. System soullessness, economic crises overlapping to social crises, and those, subject to nationalisms or xenophobia, affecting all layers equally.
It could be a gloomy cinema in a socially important mattersuch as “Plac Zbawiciel” Joanna Kos-Krauze and Krzysztof Krauze on a similar topic, but Radu Jude has a different temperament. The creator of “the happiest girl in the world” or “Aferim!” His films, also “KTIMINIental 25”, although dramatic, narratively burdensome, are also funny. Jude, a kind of Stańczyk of European cinema, but also an old, sick Europe, knows well that Humor can also be severe, painful, hungry for hearts and conscience.
Catj-Napokaa large city in northwestern Romania, lying in the Transylvanian Upland, the historic capital of Transylvania, is A place with a very complicated history. After losing by the Austro-Hungary of World War I and the Treaty in the Hungarian trianon Koloszwar, already under the name Kuj, became part of the kingdom of Romania. In 1940, by virtue of the second Viennese arbitration, he again went to Hungary, but in October 1944, this time he has the power of the Paris Treaty from 1947, he again became part of Romania. The Hungarian minority, however, is significant in Kluj and currently amounts to about twenty percent of all residents.
The main heroine of the film Jude, Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), is just Hungarian, which is important in the filmbecause Hungarian-Romanian animosities, from humor to xenophobia, are a strong background for this story. The most important, however, is the layer, let’s call it, social. Orsolya is a bailiff. A profession like a profession, not very pleasant. The matter he is dealing with is also not very pleasant. Ion (Gabriel Spahiu) was once a recognized athlete, but his life went so that he is currently struggling with alcoholism and the crisis of homelessness. The whole overture of the film belongs to him, we suspect that this will be the main character of “CiTinental 25”. Yes, it will be, but as if Post Mort. Ion is looking for a place, temporarily lives in a basement, from which he must take it soon, because a SPA hotel called “CTINENTAL” is to be built here. Orsolya is to settle this matter. However, the consequences will be dramatic. For Ion, also for a bailiff.
Jude aware of the modesty of purely film possibilities – I remind you once again that “CTINENTAL 25” was created in ten days and in the whole it was shot with an iPhonedoes not allow breath. The strength is in the dialogue, not in the frame. The film is sharp, piercing, funny. Romanian-Hungarian animosities, bailiff’s profession, systems and left money, and all this all our human poverty, complexes, shames and opportunisms. Everyone almost wet in the same sweet and sour sauce.
Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki in the poem “XVI” from the new volume, “Past of Playing your beautiful children”, he wrote: “You are untrue in the mirror / which lies the day.” In “KTIMINIental” he is lying during the day to break the night, distributing Patouśmichy.
8/10
“Continental 25”, dir. Radu Jude