Radu Jude : the end of cinema can wait

Following the announcement of the selection of Continental 25 in Competition at the Berlinale, the FIDMarseille team is delighted to announce that Radu Jude will be the guest at the 36th edition of the festival for a major retrospective of his work.

Formed in post-communist/neo-capitalist Romania, Radu Jude's work, from his first feature film (The Happiest Girl in the World, 2009) to the brilliant Don't Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023), is unique in its explosive and corrosive inventiveness.

The author of Aferim! and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is a great comic and political filmmaker, driven by an unbridled critical curiosity about the future of his country and the world. Radu Jude works on a wide range of subjects, including a scathing exposure of spectacular capitalism at its most advanced, a frontal examination of past fascism and racism and their contemporary persistence, and a gritty analysis of the family environment and its violence, all of which he explores with uncommon freedom of experimentation, driven by a communicative energy and joy, and a rare appetite for the as yet unexplored possibilities of cinema.

Alongside his feature-length fiction films, Radu Jude is the author of a series of documentary essays that form an essential part of his work. Made from photographic or film archives and edited with all kinds of materials, these little-known films will be at the heart of the FIDMarseille retrospective. It will also be an opportunity to discover his numerous short films, whose formal diversity provides an exciting laboratory for his cinema.

Like Godard, his source of inspiration, he practises his art as an everyday craft, a continuous search. This winter he completed two new feature-length fiction films, shot back-to-back in autumn 2024. What sets him apart, then, is a way of producing (cheaply) and directing (quickly) that takes the habits of contemporary auteur cinema by surprise and thwarts their constraints. Radu Jude's films follow one another at almost the same pace as Hong Sangsoo's - about two a year - but unlike the Korean master, each of his films is a prototype, an unusual formal and narrative experiment.

It is a great pride and joy for FIDMarseille to welcome Radu Jude to explore with him his first two decades of cinema. He will be in Marseille from 8 to 13 July to share his work with the public over the course of days, films and meetings.

photo © Jean-Michel Sicot - Fema 2021