“Hilarious, intellectual, and richly poetic … Another epic in miniature that deployed weaponized humour, deep empathy, grueling pathos, and sharp social critique in a manner so singular that it can only be described as Judeian.”

Travis Jeppesen, Artforum

Radu Jude’s aggressively associative dramas follow a principle the director says allows him ​“to create without inspiration.” In a quickly assembled, iPhone-shot film like Kontinental ​’25, Jude never neglects the strong and complex central performance by Eszter Tompa as the bailiff Orsolya, but he mainly works from a collage of online detritus and historical references that, in their strange mix of premonition and incoherence, only bolster the emotional wavelength of Orsolya’s moral dilemma. The film begins not with its protagonist, but with the victim of her next administration stop: a man who will be evicted. The fallout of this encounter haunts Orsolya and, like a suffering Job, she repeats the story to everyone she meets, seeking escape from the cyclical fear that she is, despite her precarity and share of pain, a harmful, unethical actor in the world. The title references Rossellini’s Europa ​’51, in which Ingrid Bergman’s character is motivated by guilt to change her life.

In Romanian, Hungarian, German, and English with English subtitles

Advisory: Kontinental ​’25 includes an excerpt of a video of bombing causing death in the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Silver Bear for Best Screenplay
Berlin 2025

“Radu Jude continues to find gold as he rummages through the trash of the modern condition … [This] may be his most radical and despairing film yet.”

Nicolas Rapold, Sight and Sound
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