Opt ilustrate din Lumea Ideală (Eight Postcards from Utopia). 2024. Romania. Directed by Radu Jude, Christian Ferencz-Flatz. US premiere. In Romanian; English subtitles. 71 min.
What happens after the decline and fall of a civilization? In their wickedly satirical montage of Romanian television commercials that were broadcast in the years following Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu’s 1989 executions by firing squad, Radu Jude (Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Bad Luck Banging, or Loony Porn) and the philosopher Christian Ferencz-Flatz have created a rhapsody of materialist kitsch. Consumers in the post-communist era, sold on visions of Romania’s glorious empirical past and gilded capitalist future, are thrown into a Wild West of get-rich-quick schemes, shiny new toys, and economic shock therapy.
Sleep #2. 2024. Romania. Directed by Radu Jude. No dialogue. 62 min.
Long obsessed with Andy Warhol as a filmmaker, Conceptual artist, and pop-culture phenom, Radu Jude—in his customary irreverent fashion—gathered up a year’s worth of webcam footage from Warhol’s gravesite to create this threnody of mourning in America. The film is a brilliant Warholian experiment like no other, tapping into the artist’s voyeuristic fascination with life caught unawares (Sleep), transcendence (Blow Job), and death at its most sensational or ignominious (Electric Chair, Tunafish Disaster), while also finding new currents of vicariousness and paranoia in our age of ubiquitous social media and surveillance.