A prolific one-man punk movement of savagely funny, profane, politically provocative cinema, Radu Jude has become a major maverick auteur figure in Romania and beyond over the last 15 years. He also has a long, prize-winning association with the Berlinale, where his latest dramatic feature Kontinental ’25 has just been awarded the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay. This modestly scaled social drama was shot on an iPhone in the Transylvanian city of Cluj, back to back with Jude’s next feature, a Dracula-themed story. It is a sober, timely, serious-minded work, but also unusually straight for such a formally and thematically daring director. Even a minor-key Jude film will always be interesting, but hardcore fans will miss his signature bite and punch.
Kontinental ’25 opens with scruffy, penniless, mentally fragile Ion (Jude regular Gabriel Spahiu) wandering the tourist-thronged streets of Cluj, fruitlessly begging for money and casual work. A former prize-winning athlete who has fallen on hard times, he now lives in a squalid basement space in a building scheduled for imminent redevelopment into a luxury hotel chain, but he is behind on rent and facing imminent eviction. When a team of bailiffs arrive to remove him from the property, led by Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), the desperate Ion is thrown into panic and takes his own life.
In a switch of main protagonist focus, which Jude credits as a steal from Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), the film’s central POV then switches to Orsolya. A former lawyer with a compassionate, liberal world-view, she is understandably mortified with guilt by Ion’s death. Adding to her burden, racist media reports pick up on her Hungarian family background, framing the eviction as a callous attack on a former Romanian sporting hero. Dropping out of a family holiday to Greece, she wanders Cluj in a daze, seeking absolution from friends and family, co-workers and authority figures. Her complicity in Ion’s death, and the deeper structural forces behind it, becomes an obsession that pushes her to impulsive, risky extremes.
Kontinental ’25 is a universal parable about the steep social costs of gentrification and neo-liberal economics, in post-Communist Romania and beyond, with a more specific local angle drawing on the centuries-old ethnic tensions still animating much of central Europe. These are recurring themes for Jude, but this time he largely avoids the propulsive, explosive, formally experimental energy that defined previous stand-out works such as Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021) and Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (2023). Naturalistic social-realist drama is the default tone here, although there are teasing flashes of the director’s usual gonzo mischief: a chat between Olsaya and her Hungarian mother that escalates into an angry shouting match about fascism, an arrogant foul-mouthed priest dispensing useless advice, an extended discussion about the ethics of donating to charity that is almost drowned out by electronic dance music.
The film’s title, poster artwork and basic plot outline pay winking homage to Roberto Rossellini’s Europa ’51 (1952), which stars Ingrid Bergman as another anguished mother thrown into soul-searching moral crisis by a tragic death. The screenplay is peppered with other quotes and allusions too, from Bertolt Brecht to rapper Ice-T, historian Tony Just and the Wim Wenders film Perfect Days (2023). The elegant still-life montages of Cluj’s empty streets and new-build apartments that frame the story invoke something of Michelangelo Antonio’s aloof eye too: urban loneliness, human disconnection, epochal shifts in social history inscribed in architecture. There is plenty of meaty subtext to contemplate here, and some fine aesthetic touches too, but Kontinental ’25 is still Jude at his most conventional and understated. A minor film from a major film-maker.
Director, screenwriter: Radu Jude
Cast: Eszter Tompa, Gabriel Spahiu, Adonis Tanta, Oana Mardare, Serban Pavlu
Cinematography: Marius Panduru
Editing: Catalin Cristutiu
Production design: Andreea Popa
Producers: Alexandru Teodorescu, Rodrigo Teixeira
Poduction company: Saga Film (Romania)
World sales: Luxbox, Pais
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
In Romanian
109 minutes
