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
“Imprecise, vague, barbaric, irrational”: the cinema of Carolina Adriazola and José Luis Sepúlveda.
Rarely shown outside of Latin America, the films of Chileans Carolina Adriazola and José Luis Sepúlveda make up one of the most unclassifiable and stimulating bodies of work in contemporary cinema. From the visceral El pejesapo (2007) to the savagely virtuosic Cuadro negro (Grand Prix at the Punto de Vista Festival 2025), FIDMarseille is pleased to present the first-ever retrospective of their work in Europe.
Their early films, impossible to reduce to the categories of fiction or documentary, can be seen as X-rays of the dissatisfaction that gave rise to the 2011 protests and the 2019 uprising in Chile – a country where deep social inequalities persist as remnants of the military dictatorship (1973-1990). Aligned with movements that, in recent decades, have embodied popular discontent, hostile to the pressure of one of the most violent neoliberal regimes in the world, Adriazola and Sepúlveda have never worked for the market. On the contrary, their production and distribution processes are self-managed and horizontal, much like FECISO — Festival de Cine Social y Antisocial, which has brought cinema to peripheral communities since 2007, or their Escuela Popular de Cine, which offers free training and workshops.
The cinema of Adriazola and Sepúlveda ventures into slippery terrain, into dark regions where fiction rarely dares to tread. It develops unorthodox performative techniques and takes on, with both rage and humor, not only the supposed hierarchy on both sides of the camera but also the immutability of social and cultural roles. A recurring gesture in several of their films is to pass the camera to those being filmed: a way of signaling the impossibility of creating a complete or definitive portrait of a community that is never seen in a univocal way. It is also a way of removing any boundary between the inside and the outside and, with it, any comfortable distance. The unique political energy of Adriazola and Sepúlveda's films, resistant to any ideological crystallization, may only be matched by that of Glauber Rocha, whom they admire, and who once called for a cinema, perhaps in anticipation of such films, that would dare to be "imprecise, vague, barbaric, irrational".
Carolina Adriazola and José Luis Sepúlveda will be in Marseille from 8th to 13th July to share with the audience the vigour of their incendiary punk films and introduce them to the mysteries of their guerrilla filmmaking.
— A restrospective curated by Manuel Asín
Film critic, former artistic director of the Festival Punto de Vista
portrait © Punto de Vista