Screenings

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.

Director

Radu Jude

Biography

Radu Jude, born in Bucharest (Romania) in 1977, was initially an assistant director and then made several short films before moving on to feature films with THE HAPPIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD. This was followed by three more feature films, including AFERIM!. In 2016, he directed ‚Scenes from a Marriage‘ by Ingmar Bergman in the National Theatre in Timişoara. Five years later, in 2021, he directed BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale. DON’T EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD was celebrated with a flood of awards in 2023.

Filmography

The Tube with a Hat (2006) The Happiest Girl in the World (2009), Everybody in Our Family (2012), Aferim! (2015), Scarred Hearts (2016), I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018), The Potemkinists (2020), Uppercase Print (2020), The Exit of the Trains (2020); Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021), Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023), Eight Postcards from Utopia (2024), Kontinental ’25 (2025)