The Beginner's Guide to Radu Jude

The most exciting thing to catch my eye the morning I scanned over this year's Belfast Film Festival’s programme was that the president of the international jury was one of my favourite working filmmakers, raving mad Romanian satirist Radu Jude. Jude’s latest fiction film, the sprawling, pitch-black comedy Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of the World was my favourite film of last year’s festival. A near 3 hour odyssey through the daily life of a put-upon production assistant in Bucharest as she frantically attempts to keep it together while working on a series of somewhat insidious employee training videos about taking responsibility for work-related accidents, few films have better reflected today’s working culture on screen so incisively. So to help out, I decided I’d write a beginner’s guide to Jude’s work that might prepare people to see him In Conversation at QFT on November 2.

Watching The Films
Now this is going to be the most obvious way to get ready, but might be trickier than it seems, not many of the big streaming services are jumping for joy to add abrasive Romanian social satire to their catalogues and none of his films currently have an in-print DVD or Blu-Ray release in this region. Helpfully the BFI Player currently has a small collection consisting of his 2012 sophomore effort Everybody in Our Family and his two most recent, the previously discussed Do Not Expect Too Much… as well as 2021’s raucously anarchic Bad Luck Banging (Or Loony Porn). This was the film that introduced me to Jude’s cinematic stylings, following a school teacher who has to defend her job before the parents’ association after her sex tape leaks, but dives into all manner of topics from covid denialism to an extensive tangent on mid-century Romanian fascism. The film features one of the decade’s great final shots, which Jude can be seen directing on the event’s preview image on this very website. Radu’s biggest brush with traditional genre, the 2015 western Aferim can be found on the StudioCanal Presents ‘streaming channel’ on any services that offer that sort of thing, like Prime Video or Apple TV. MUBI also currently has a wonderful selection of 6 of his shorts, which span 15 years of his career to date titled Rules Don’t Apply. After that you’re tragically out of luck for legitimate ways to watch Jude’s feature work however, as films like his 2012 debut The Happiest Girl In The World and his 2018 Berlinale winner I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians are currently out of circulation.

20th Century Romanian History
Despite being very much a satirist of our modern world, Jude’s work is often fascinated with the present as a product of the past, particularly with regards to his native Romania. Romania faced a huge current of social change throughout the 20th century, oscillating between monarchism, fascism, communism and free market capitalism all in the space of 100 years and this informs the deeply cynical outlook of his films. This is of particular focus in a truly one-of-a-kind sequence in Bad Luck Banging… where the film breaks from traditional film form to present you with an intermission of sorts, presenting a text and image-only A-Z list of facts about Romanian history. It sounds audacious and was deeply riveting in the moment to me. I’d stretch to think of another filmmaker willing to make such a move in the midst of their film.

A TikTok Account
In sharp contrast to his position as an arthouse darling, any interview with Jude I’ve ever read has often taken a turn to him talking about the strangest things he’s seen on the hugely popular short-form video app lately, so don’t be surprised if his discussion at BFF takes a similar turn. This preoccupation has shown up in his work lately too, with one of the most memorable images in Do Not Expect Too Much… being the Andrew Tate-esque Bobita character that Angela inhabits through the power of a Brian Jordan Alvarez-esque face-swap filte. In one of her rare breaks from work, Angela espouses a vulgar, sarcastic critique of prominent anti-feminist influencers in sequences wildly at odds with the visual style of the rest of the film. Jude makes this all fit into the film’s wide tapestry though, making the presence of this style of day-to-day guerilla filmmaking that millions across the world are engaging in a part of his audacious arthouse world.

There’s a lot more to say but I’ll leave them some ground to cover when they actually talk to Jude in QFT on the evening of November 2nd.