Radu Jude, the Bard of Bucharest
A visitor to Bucharest, Romania’s capital, will notice that many of the city’s buildings—which range from graceful Belle Époque mansions constructed in the late nineteenth century to unlovely apartment complexes thrown up during postwar urbanization—are marked with a bright-red disk. Unlike the blue plaques affixed to residences in London, which indicate where notable figures once lived, or the Stolpersteine (or stumbling stones) embedded in the sidewalks of German cities to mark the former homes of Holocaust victims, Bucharest’s red disks are not commemorative but predictive. “It means that, in the next earthquake, this building could fall down,” Radu Jude, the Romanian film director, explained to me recently, when I met him in the capital, his native city.
It’s been forty-nine years since Bucharest was last devastated by a major earthquake, on March 4, 1977. Dozens of flimsy apartment buildings collapsed; nearly fifteen hundred residents died. Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania’s Communist leader, seized the opportunity to remake the ravaged city, ordering not just the demolition of compromised structures but a more extensive urban clearance. The entire neighborhood of Uranus, whose historic churches were built along hilly, cobblestoned streets, was razed. In its place rose the grandiose Palace of the Parliament—a neoclassical hulk that is the second-largest administrative building in the world, surpassed only by the Pentagon.
Before the building was completed, Ceaușescu’s reign ended in revolution. In December, 1989, at the conclusion of a year when Communist regimes across Eastern Europe were collapsing, Ceaușescu ordered the violent quashing of demonstrations in the western city of Timișoara. Dozens of protesters died, and not long afterward Ceaușescu, while delivering a speech from the balcony of the Communist Party’s Bucharest headquarters, was jeered into silence by a furious public. He was soon captured by the Romanian Army as he attempted to flee the country. On Christmas Day, a military tribunal sentenced him to death and executed him by firing squad.
Jude, who was born a month after the 1977 earthquake, was twelve when this political earthquake occurred. “The rumors about what had happened in Timișoara, and how many people were killed, were everywhere,” he recalled, as we sat in the office of his video editor, in an elegant villa in central Bucharest. When the revolution happened, he told me, he was spending the Christmas holidays with his grandparents, in a village outside the city, “but it was quite close to a military airport, so you could hear gunshots.” After footage of Ceaușescu’s corpse was broadcast on television, “there was a huge joy—you could feel the change.” His grandfather cursed the former leader while Jude’s grandmother wept at Ceaușescu’s execution—not because she admired him but because, Jude said, “it felt like a loss of something that was essential to her.” As it turned out, he noted, “many more people were killed after Ceaușescu left, because of the chaos.” The dictator’s successor, Ion Iliescu, viciously crushed pro-democracy demonstrations. It took until the end of 1991 for a new constitution to be established.
Similarly, Ceaușescu’s authoritarian makeover of Bucharest has been dwarfed by unbridled development since the revolution. “The earthquake destroyed houses everywhere,” Jude said. “But there was much more destruction, in a paradoxical way, in a free society—by bad planning, bad management, corrupt politicians, and greedy real-estate investors. There are more monuments of architecture destroyed after the revolution than in Ceaușescu’s time.” We headed out into the streets, and Jude led me to sites of vanished historic structures: a nineteenth-century marketplace demolished to accommodate a widened road, an ornate cinema whose only remnants are a few bricks littering a parking lot. As we navigated sidewalks narrowed by late-winter heaps of dirty snow, Jude, who is a big, bearish man with bristly salt-and-pepper hair and a scruff of beard, pointed out the buildings marked with red disks. Other signs warned of danger from crumbling masonry overhead, though there was none of the scaffolding that might accompany such notices. Jude mentioned that a friend of his, who had recently returned from Odesa, in Ukraine, had said that Bucharest resembles a wartime city more than Odesa does.
Jude isn’t particularly fond of Bucharest, which is traffic-clogged, bedevilled by corruption, and generally exhausting. And he is afraid of the next quake—a when-not-if proposition, given Romania’s turbulent geology. Still, apart from his preschool years, when he lived with his grandparents, and a few months in 2023, when he had a fellowship in Berlin, he has spent his entire life there. (He speaks fluent English, the lingua franca of the film industry in Eastern Europe.) Although Romania has a well-documented emigration problem—between the revolution and 2021, the country lost nearly a fifth of its population—Jude prefers to stay put. “For life, it’s terrible, but for cinema it’s a city that reveals itself—that shows what it has behind,” he explained. “Somehow, the ideologies, the politics, the philosophy, the aesthetics—it’s all very easy to grasp. It’s not like other cities, where they look clean but, behind, you find something more shady going on. Here, it’s nothing more complicated than what is obvious.”
As we approached his apartment building, Jude pointed out a Beaux-Arts mansion that had been extended vertically into a complex of modern apartments, with glass balconies hovering above an intricately wrought frontage. “This was also considered a monument,” Jude said. “They had the right to develop it, but they had to keep the façade.” He rapped the surface with his knuckles. Instead of the dull solidity of stone, it had the resonance of hollow wood. Rather than restore the façade, as required, the developer had replaced it with a false one. “It’s just a fake thing, and it’s already falling apart—it’s insulting the intelligence of everyone,” Jude said. The wall was as insubstantial as a set on a film studio’s back lot. “I think they used the same carpenter that we do,” he said.
The unanticipated consequences of transformational change are energetically explored in Jude’s films. He works in a bracingly wide variety of forms, from documentary shorts to dramatic features, and he sometimes combines them—say, with the incorporation of archival footage into a satire, or with an abrupt shift in tone from the essayistic to the narrative. Often, his subject is what he calls the “brutal capitalism” of contemporary Romania, as well as the country’s rising neofascist nationalist movement, which demonizes the European Union—the country became a member in 2007—and valorizes authoritarians of the past, from Vlad the Impaler to Ceauşescu. “To tell people, ‘Now you have freedom of travelling, or of speech’—they say, ‘The problem is we don’t have anything to eat,’ ” Jude explained. “In a certain way, the regime was better for them. The disaster of the new regime is that it rejected everything that was good, at least in intention, in the Communist society, so the capitalism we have is much harsher than in other, Western countries.”
Jude’s first feature film, “The Happiest Girl in the World,” released in 2009, is a bittersweet drama centered on a provincial girl’s conflict with her parents; in its contemporary realism and nuanced social observation, it resembles the work of other directors belonging to the so-called Romanian New Wave, which flourished in the two-thousands. (Jude was an assistant director on one of the standouts from that period, Cristi Puiu’s “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” a 2006 film about a dying man who keeps getting turned away by Bucharest hospitals.) But Jude’s subsequent movies have gone in a less conventional direction. In “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians,” released in 2019, he tackled an event from 1941 that had been expunged from classrooms during the Communist era: the dictator Ion Antonescu’s collaboration with the Nazis in the massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Odesa. (The title, characteristic of Jude in its vibrant wordiness, comes from a speech by Romania’s foreign minister at the time.) In the film, a modern-day young female director, Mariana, played by Ioana Iacob, stages a reënactment of the massacre at a square in Bucharest. Jude juxtaposes archival footage of Nazi executions with a shocking yet appallingly entertaining reprise of the Odesa massacre; to depict it, he recruited battle reënactors on Facebook. The reputation of Antonescu, who was executed for war crimes in 1946, has been undergoing a perverse rehabilitation by Romania’s far right, and “Barbarians” decries not just the atrocities of the past but also the delusions of the present. “The idea was that Romanians were always victims, victims, victims, and that we never did anything wrong as a country, as a community, to anybody else,” he said. “And, even if you don’t buy the propaganda, it gets into you somehow. You say, ‘Well, I’m Romanian, I would never kill someone.’ And then, when you discover that’s not true, you feel really shaken. I felt really shaken.”
In “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World,” released in 2024, Angela Răducanu, an overworked producer of television commercials, spends a hectic day driving ceaselessly around Bucharest’s congested streets. The character, played by Ilinca Manolache, is meeting job candidates for a project commissioned by an Austrian corporation; she needs to cast an injured employee for a worker-safety film. This main narrative, shot in grainy black-and-white Super 16-mm. film, is intercut with color clips from a Romanian movie made during the Ceauşescu era—“Angela Goes On,” directed by Lucian Bratu—which dramatizes the life of a female taxi-driver. In a surreal intertextual turn, Bratu’s Angela, played by Dorina Lazăr, appears in Jude’s contemporary Bucharest. She is now the mother of a grownup son, Ovidiu, who uses a wheelchair because of a work-related injury—and who gets the dubious honor of appearing in the corporate video.
The braiding of an old film into a new one is an inspired device for highlighting history’s continuities and discontinuities. Bratu’s movie was lighthearted in tone, but it had passages that betrayed some of the harsher dimensions of existence under Communism. Jude slows down Bratu’s footage when that director’s camera incidentally captures people waiting in a long line to buy groceries or pans across a street that was later flattened to make way for Ceaușescu’s Palace of the Parliament. Manolache, who has appeared in several of Jude’s movies, told me, “Radu’s films are political, like Godard’s films are. But it’s more than that. They are sensual, they have moments of extreme fragility, and they are very beautiful.” Her character spends her endless day of driving in a sequin-covered T-shirt minidress. The impractical outfit is an expression of Angela Răducanu’s suppressed creativity: her dress dances in the light even as she is immobilized behind the wheel.
“End of the World” offers a potent counterpoint to the German director Maren Ade’s film “Toni Erdmann,” an acclaimed 2016 comedy that stars Sandra Hüller as a German business consultant making her way in Bucharest’s Wild West of neoliberal capitalism. In “Toni Erdmann,” the city is a depressing way station for a striving international executive. Jude, by contrast, looks at Bucharest from the perspective of Romanians, who understandably resent being poor subalterns within the European Union. To help make the point, Jude cast the distinguished German actress Nina Hoss as a haughty Austrian executive, who appears as a privileged outsider scanning the city’s streets from the back seat of Angela Răducanu’s vehicle. Andrei Gorzo and Veronica Lazăr, Romanian film scholars, have described “End of the World” as perhaps “the most relentless cinematic attack on capitalism in the history of Romanian cinema—not excluding its state-socialist era.” Jude said, “During the dictatorship, we believed that whatever is wrong is because it’s a dictatorship. Then, after the revolution, it was something like ‘There is all this chaos because this is still the transition period—there’s no money, it’s a poor country.’ And then, after ten years of that, in the last twenty-five years, it’s obvious that it’s not that. It’s just that society is unable to organize itself.”
“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” which won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2021, centers on a schoolteacher named Emi whose homemade sex tape accidentally goes viral. A similar scandal befell a Romanian teacher, Oana Zaharia, who lost her job; Jude reached out to her on Facebook, then gave her a small part in the movie. “Bad Luck Banging” scathingly critiques the hypocrisies of Romanian attitudes toward sex; Emi gets pilloried for having what appears to be an enjoyable conjugal relationship, even as the society around her is grotesquely pornified. (A billboard showing a woman’s face tilted upward and her tongue sticking out is accompanied by the slogan “I Like It Deep.”) The film is structured as a triptych, and its second section features vignettes and images that give context to the humiliation that Emi experiences in the third. A clip of a woman performing fellatio is set alongside text noting that “blowjob” is the most frequently searched term in an online dictionary, followed by “empathy”; an archival clip of schoolchildren singing a martial anthem is captioned “Children: political prisoners of their parents.” Jude told me that his predilection for montage was influenced by Sergei Eisenstein, the Russian director. Eisenstein’s “greatest discovery,” Jude said, was that onscreen you could “put one element next to another, or more, in order to break narrative and create an idea.” Jude went on, “I feel that where there is montage, there is poetry as opposed to narrative, which could be considered prose. I like to mix them.”
Most of Jude’s recent feature films have a female protagonist, many of whom, like Emi, resist the conservative or inhumane forces around them. Jude told me, “Maybe one or two years ago, I would have said it’s pure coincidence. But, given that it’s five films, it must be more than that.” By focussing on female characters, Jude invites sympathy for individuals who are structurally less empowered than their male peers, just as Romania occupies a position of weakness in relation to its European neighbors. Manolache, a prominent feminist figure in Romania, told me, “I don’t know if I would have been able to write something as punk, as powerful, and feminist as Radu did for my part” in “End of the World.” The character of Angela Răducanu, she said, “is very powerful and fearless, and like a beast.” Zaharia told me, “I think Radu is fascinated by women—he thinks women are very complex and very smart. You feel respected, and you don’t feel objectified. You feel like he is interested in your soul, in your mind.”
This spring, Jude is releasing another examination of Romania’s complicated status within Europe, “Kontinental ’25.” The title indicates Jude’s debt to Roberto Rossellini’s “Europe ’51,” in which Ingrid Bergman plays a woman in Italy reckoning with her son’s suicide. The protagonist of “Kontinental ’25” is Orsolya, a former professor of Roman law turned bailiff, played by Eszter Tompa, who is traumatized by the suicide of an elderly homeless man whom she had to turn out of a derelict building that is going to be converted into a boutique hotel. “Kontinental ’25,” which won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, combines coruscating satire with profound empathy. The suicide occurs right at the start, and the remainder of the film consists largely of anxious conversations that Orsolya has with others, in which she seeks to express and expiate her feelings of guilt. She and a friend discuss making donations to charity through the sanitizing distance of a monthly surcharge on a mobile-phone bill. Her Orthodox priest reassures her that nobody is without sin. This glib absolution helps Orsolya move past feelings of self-recrimination, and she embarks on a trip to Greece that she’s delayed. But, once Jude shows her heading off, he forces the viewer to focus on the dehumanizing economic forces that caused the suicide in the first place: the film concludes with a long essayistic montage of recently built apartments, any of which could have sheltered the dead man.
“Kontinental ’25” is set in the northern city of Cluj, and Jude shot it in ten days, using an iPhone—a technical challenge that he also set for himself in the making of another movie released this year, “Dracula,” which was filmed with the same crew, equipment, and, in some cases, cast as “Kontinental ’25.” With a budget of only about a million euros for “Dracula,” the doubling up was partly an economic decision, but Jude told me that he was also inspired by Roger Corman, the Hollywood B-movie director: “Corman said, ‘You’re in the location, you have horses, you have actors, you have costumes, whatever. So why don’t you make two movies?’ ”
Drawing on Romania’s proud national mythology concerning the original Dracula, the fifteenth-century ruler also known as Vlad the Impaler, Jude presents sketches in different modes, from broad comedy and historical drama to cheesily rendered A.I. sequences. Several scenes are set in a vampire-themed restaurant, whose stake-bearing Western dinner guests chase a hapless Dracula, played by Gabriel Spahiu, through medieval streets; it’s what Monty Python might have done had vampires been part of British popular culture. Meanwhile, a tour guide’s account of an event from Vlad the Impaler’s life—he rounded up disabled and elderly residents, locked them inside a building, then set it aflame—reminds viewers that the nation’s hero was a proto-Nazi. To the extent that the various sections of the film are connected, it is through the character of a director using A.I. to brainstorm ideas for a movie about Dracula—a stand-in for Jude, who was given funding to make the film after half jokingly proposing the idea at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Until then, Jude had never read Bram Stoker’s novel, which was suppressed during the Communist era, its supernatural themes being out of alignment with Romania’s view of itself as a modern industrial nation. Once Jude read the book, he realized that he couldn’t do a straightforward adaptation. “I don’t care about vampires,” he explained. “I ended up doing what I liked, but it was a process of fighting with the material—and also finding a way that is not Hollywood, not big-budget. I couldn’t compete with that even if I wanted to.”
The movie’s antic humor evokes the international Fluxus movement of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, which made political arguments through outrageous absurdity. “Dracula” is bawdy from its opening scene, which offers sixteen A.I.-generated iterations of the titular vampire announcing, “I am Vlad the Impaler, Dracula. You can suck my cock.” Uncharacteristically for Jude, the movie lacks a rounded individual at its center, which may be why some viewers—myself included—found more to admire than to enjoy. Manohla Dargis, of the Times, called it “a gleefully crude and vulgar go-for-broke provocation that is as grindingly repetitive as it is self-amused.” Loyal cinephiles have characterized the work as a deliberate affront. Victor Morozov, an academic who has written widely on Jude’s œuvre, told me, “After producing some very satisfying and accomplished films, I think he felt a need to basically destroy this heritage and produce an anti-artistic gesture.” Morozov continued, “In today’s economy of images, when we feel that we’ve seen everything, and everything has been banalized, and our sensibility is a lot more equipped to deal with shocking material, to still be able to produce a negative reaction like this—to me, it is interesting.”
Jude is proud of his “Dracula,” which he believes is the “lightest film I have made, and the funniest—the most full of storytelling and bad jokes, like Bocaccio’s Decameron or ‘The Canterbury Tales.’ ” The hostile reviews surprised him, he explained over dinner one evening, at his cozy, book-lined apartment. He lives there with his partner, Raluca Munteanu, who does public-relations work for N.G.O.s, and their ten-year-old son. (Jude also has a twenty-year-old son, from an earlier relationship.) As Munteanu served an endive tart, Jude poured wine and fiddled with an arrangement of magnets on the refrigerator, adjusting a postcard of Queen Elizabeth II so that a cigar-shaped metal magnet angled lewdly toward her mouth. Jude once told me he was a bit embarrassed that some critics and viewers have depicted him as a kind of pornographer.“I am not,” he insisted, pointing out that the obscenities of “Dracula” were, in part, an ironic commentary on a filmmaker’s contract with his audience. “Most commercial films are supposed to have sex, nudity, genre elements, and violence, and since this film is supposed to be a commercial film—sort of—I delivered what I am supposed to,” he said. “I am still amazed that the people I made all these choices for rejected it.”
American film-festival audiences, Jude noted over dinner, had objected not just to the vulgarity but to his use of A.I., given the technology’s potential erosion of film-industry jobs. “There wasn’t a single interview that wasn’t half focussed on A.I.,” he said. “Whereas here, it didn’t seem like such a big deal, because we don’t have a big industry.” The notion that A.I. should be taboo among auteurs hadn’t occurred to Jude, who used it in part for its amusingly janky aesthetic and in part because it allowed him to include scenes—such as a horse-drawn carriage violently flipping out of control—that he couldn’t afford to shoot. Jude’s productivity is such that the rejection of “Dracula” stings less than it might if he’d taken several years to make the film, and, besides, he believes that it may stand the test of time. He observed, good-naturedly, “All failed artists hope that posterity will make them the new Emily Dickinson.”
As more wine was poured, our conversation turned to Andrew Tate, the loutish, misogynistic British American influencer who moved to Romania in 2017, because of what he perceived as its lax law enforcement. “He said in an interview that you can rape someone and nothing will happen!” Jude said. (Tate’s words were “I’m not a fucking rapist, but I like the idea of just being able to do what I want.”) Jude became aware of Tate’s existence a few years ago, when his older son, Alex, then around fourteen, stumbled across Tate’s videos on YouTube. All adolescent boys are exposed to the manosphere; not all spot its most notorious avatar driving through their city in a luxury car, as Alex recently did.
Munteanu got out her phone to show Jude an Instagram reel she’d seen earlier that day, of an A.I.-generated Donald Trump wearing a vampire’s cloak and speaking in a familiar, disjointed cascade: “Hello, Romania, ă bună ziua, very mysterious country, very spooky, we love Romania, mountains, forests, castles, very dramatic.” Romania is extremely online. It has one of the highest rates of social-media use in Europe, with nearly half the population on TikTok. Jude is an omnivorous consumer of social- media slop. Its combination of inventiveness and mundanity reminds him of the early films of the Lumière brothers, who paved the way for modern cinema with their invention of the cinematograph. TikTok and similar platforms have, he said, “a kind of dumbness that I think is enriching, in a way.” He added, “I think sometimes Trump reaches this level of dumbness that makes it fascinating. Like this video of him throwing shit on protesters”—an A.I.-generated clip, reposted by the President on the same day as a No Kings rally, of Trump flying in a military plane and dropping feces on demonstrators. Jude has never been to the United States; he’d like to go, he told me, but wants to stay for several weeks, rather than jetting in and out for a film festival. Of the clip, Jude said, “If he was an artist, I would say, ‘Wow, he’s great.’ The problem is that he is the President.”
In Romanian politics, social media has had its own outsized influence. In the first round of the country’s 2024 Presidential election, a far-right candidate, Călin Georgescu, who had campaigned largely on TikTok, scored a surprise upset; the result was annulled by Romania’s constitutional court and the election delayed. The annulment was controversial; even some of Georgescu’s leftist detractors argued that the decision was anti-democratic. Others, including Jude, felt that Georgescu should have been barred from running at all, given that he had spoken approvingly of Antonescu, and promoting Fascism is illegal in Romania. “I think it was O.K. to stop the election, though it is not a good sign altogether,” Jude said. (Georgescu was banned from the rerun election after claims of Russian interference in the first round.) He and Munteanu had been ready to move to Berlin if the right-wing candidate who remained in the race, George Simion, had won the subsequent election. “We were packing,” she told me.
Ultimately, their preferred candidate, a moderate, prevailed, but Jude said that he is disappointed with the new administration’s policies, which have cut already paltry funding for public education. (Both of his sons have attended public school.) Jude teaches periodically at a university in Cluj, and he’s been appalled to see how the persistent underfunding of education has set back Romanian students compared with those he has taught in Germany and Spain. “They want to study cinema, but they cannot write two sentences,” he said. “I always say that we in Romania must work much harder than our Western colleagues, not only because they are richer but also because they are better equipped from the outset. It’s really painful to say it, but it’s true.”
Jude wasn’t born into the intelligentsia: his father worked as a technical planner for public transportation in Bucharest, and his mother was a typist. His paternal grandparents were peasants in Transylvania; his maternal grandparents were also peasants, and his grandmother was illiterate. The village where they lived permitted some private farming but also required inhabitants to contribute to a collective farm. “They had a cow, for milk, and you were forced, as a peasant, to give the calves of the cow to the collective farm,” he told me. “My grandfather did what basically everybody did—suffocate the calf when it was born and pretend that it was born dead, just so as not to give it to the collective farm.”
Jude moved to Bucharest to join his parents when he started school. “The countryside was a kind of paradise lost for me,” he said. He discovered film in his teens, when a friend urged him to join the Romanian Cinémathèque. “Before the revolution, the Cinémathèque was like a citadel—it was very difficult to get in if you were not someone from the regime,” he told me. “You had to bribe someone to get the permits. After the revolution, it was open to everybody, but nobody went anymore, because there were other things that were much more interesting,” such as participating in street demonstrations. An unenthusiastic student at a high school specializing in math—he thought that he was pretty good at the subject until he met his classmates—Jude spent his free time working his way through the Cinémathèque’s patchy archive. Many of the imported color films had been reproduced in black-and-white during the Communist era, as an economizing measure. “ ‘Apocalypse Now’ was black-and-white. ‘The Godfather’ was black-and-white,” he told me. “ ‘Taxi Driver’ made a big impression, in a black-and-white copy. I realized only many years later, seeing Scorsese on TV, when he complained about the red color in the print, that it was originally in color.” (To avoid an X rating, Scorsese had reluctantly agreed to desaturate the blood-red color in the grisly final scene.) The movies weren’t subtitled, and sometimes a screening included a live narrator doing simultaneous translation into Romanian. After this perverse introduction to Hollywood films, Jude expanded his cinematic compass by going to the British Council, where he watched VHS tapes of works by ambitious British directors—Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, Ken Loach.
Jude applied to Bucharest’s prestigious film school three times, but on each occasion he was rejected. Instead, he enrolled at a school for television production. In the late nineties and early two-thousands, Romania became a destination for international TV and film projects whose creators wanted to hire crews who were cheap and willing to endure unlimited hours. After graduating, Jude began working as an assistant on movies and also in advertising. Western directors had prestige, even when they lacked talent—which left Romanians like himself doing the grunt work. He told me, “I was the assistant of a director for a shoot, and he was trembling the morning of the shoot, and he said, ‘I’m telling you, but it’s only between us—I actually sent a friend’s show reel to the agency. I have never directed anything in my life, and I don’t know what to do.’ He was an American.” At the same time, the foreigners’ budgets gave Jude the opportunity to try out equipment he couldn’t otherwise get his hands on, like the Foxy crane, which allows for sweeping, high-angle shots. “In the preproduction meeting, I would say, ‘For this shot, we need a Foxy crane,’ and they would say, ‘How much is that?’ And I would say, ‘Three thousand euros,’ ” he remembered. “For a commercial that had a production budget of a million, three thousand euros was nothing.”
Alexandru Teodorescu, a Romanian producer who has worked on Jude’s most recent releases, told me, “When Radu was a director for advertisements, I feel like he was upset from minute No. 1 on set.” The hours were excessive, Jude recalled: “It was like a mantra—they would say, ‘Well, we know when a film day starts, but you never know when it will end.’ Sometimes it would be eight hours, sometimes twelve, twenty, twenty-eight.” “End of the World” was inspired in part by the story of a production assistant who died in a car crash after working an obscenely long shift.
From the start, Jude found the advertising business vacuous, though he infused his projects with his impish wit. In one of his commercials, for a cellphone provider, Ceaușescu himself is interrupted mid-speech by the ringing of a mobile phone. (The tagline: “First you earned your right to speak freely—now you want to speak for free!”) Jude was painfully conscious of the despoiling of his creative talents. He recalled a pivotal conversation with Alexandru Dabija, a theatre director who is a generation Jude’s senior. “I was speaking with him on the phone, and I said, ‘What are you doing?’ ” Jude remembered. “He said, ‘Oh, I’m doing these Chekhov plays, Shakespeare plays, Molière. What are you doing?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m shooting a beer commercial, a mustard commercial, a yogurt commercial.’ And he said, ‘Why the fuck are you doing that?’ ”
Thus far, Jude has made films only in and about Romania. He is not, however, averse to the idea of working in other contexts and languages. His next feature, which he hopes will be on the festival circuit later this year, is loosely adapted from the French novel “The Diary of a Chambermaid,” by Octave Mirbeau, which was published in 1900. Shot in France and partially underwritten by a French production company, Jude’s interpretation transposes the maid’s experience to that of a Romanian immigrant. (The script is in both French and Romanian.) Also on the slate is a Frankenstein project that he intends to make with Sebastian Stan, the Romanian American actor who played a young Donald Trump in the 2024 movie “The Apprentice.” The Frankenstein film, Jude told me, will be provocatively set at a C.I.A. black site that was established in Bucharest in the early two-thousands for covert U.S. interrogations of Al Qaeda suspects. If Jude seems prolific, it’s because he spent so many years in advertising, working on things he didn’t want to make, he told me; but his productivity is also the result of a voracious curiosity.
Last year, Jude even became an actor for the first time, taking a small role in a forthcoming film, “The Unknown_,”_ by the French director Arthur Harari. (Harari was a co-writer, with his wife, Justine Triet, of the 2023 film “Anatomy of a Fall,” which Triet directed.) Harari told me that he chose Jude partly because “you can’t really tell which is his social background—he could be a university teacher as well as a crane operator.” He also liked the timbre of Jude’s voice, which, Harari noted, “goes from low to high pitch in a microsecond. It’s extremely lively and surprising.”
One morning while I was visiting Jude, he had to rerecord some dialogue for Harari’s movie, which was in postproduction in Paris, and so I joined him at a studio on the outskirts of Bucharest, with the French team appearing on Zoom on a laptop. As the scene was projected onto a screen, Jude seemed slightly horrified to see himself in front of the camera rather than behind it. He explained that, half a dozen years ago, he had suffered a bout of Bell’s palsy that had caused facial paralysis, from which he had not entirely recovered, though to my eye he had no impairment. “I cannot blow a balloon—that’s the test to see if you are completely cured,” he told me. I remarked that it was just as well he didn’t work as a clown. “Well, I am a clown,” he responded.
He then delivered some angry dialogue, in Romanian, for the scene. Harari asked for a translation of one line, and Jude happily provided it: “It means, ‘Fuck your dead relatives of your mother.’ ”
The next film Jude plans to make is based on “Miorița,” a centuries-old Romanian ballad in which a sheepherder is warned by a talking ewe that he will be murdered by other sheepherders. Rather than escape, the sheepherder accepts his death. Jude said, “It is interesting that this ballad provoked, and still provokes, a lot of thinking that we Romanians are historically unable to react to anything, because our fundamental text is about a sheepherder who, when he is informed that he is going to be killed, says, ‘I accept my fate.’ ”
Jude had already identified one of two locations in which his adaptation would be shot—a well-preserved ancient village outside Bucharest. Now he was searching for its counterpart—a modern office building, on the edge of the capital, that he hoped would overlook fields where sheep might graze. One morning, I joined him to scout a prospective location in a corporate park. We entered an atrium where modular couches were surrounded by luxuriantly filled planters, all enclosed by ten stories of glass-walled offices.
“It feels old-fashioned,” Jude observed. “It’s like things that are developed here were developed thirty or forty years ago in other places.”
We toured an office space, formerly occupied by a German transportation-and-logistics company. Conference rooms were identified by the names of other, more prosperous cities—London, Brussels. A wall bore the oversized image of a young man wearing a hard hat, heroically gazing into the distance like a figure on a Soviet mural. Beneath was English corporatese: “Win Together: We succeed by collaborating with partners and customers—working as one team to create global solutions beyond borders.” From a window, Jude looked down on a scrubby expanse where multiple apartment buildings were under construction. “They build these things where there’s no infrastructure around—no roads, no schools, no hospitals,” he said. “Sometimes the roads are so narrow that fire trucks cannot get in.”
We descended in an elevator, joining two young people, one holding a phone on a selfie stick, the other clutching a ceremonial platter bearing several pairs of scissors. They were evidently readying themselves for an opening ceremony of some kind. In a plaza outside, we discovered the occasion—the opening of a branch of Froo, a subsidiary of a Polish convenience-store chain.
Jude told me that he was feeling bad about some of the criticisms he’d made of Bucharest. “Maybe it sounded too harsh and superior, because there are things I like, of course,” he said. “It’s more a frustration of feeling the potential and the possible healthier development, and instead it goes in the opposite direction.” Later, he explained that sometimes he even liked the city’s chaos and the way its visual conjunctions were themselves a kind of montage. “It is full of readymades,” he said. “It is a Duchampian city.”
The scene unfolding outside the office building was loaded with juxtapositions. Someone was costumed as a carton of French fries; another individual, dressed as a hot dog, hurried past, looking suspiciously like he’d just sneaked off for a cigarette. As we were speaking, Jude was interrupted by an amplified voice in accented English: “Store No. 200—Wow! You absolutely proved that ‘impossible’ is not true.”
Jude needed to get back to the city center. He planned to take the subway; he once had a driver’s license, but he let it lapse and is in no hurry to get a new one. He wouldn’t even ride in my Uber. It would be faster his way, he assured me. He observed, “In Ceaușescu times, you had to make a lot of effort to get a car—to be put on a list and wait months, sometimes years. After the revolution, there was an explosion of luxury cars, as a Western fashion. You have people living in poverty, living in bad conditions, or eating very badly, just to afford these cars, so it grew again as a symbol of distinction. Maybe there is a bit more awareness that it’s not the greatest idea in the world to have cars one on top of another. But it still is like that.”
Jude went on, “I used to bike a lot, and I used to take my kid to kindergarten on the bike, going by back streets. The kindergarten had a medical assistant who checked the kids’ health, and she was always saying that my kid had a rash, or was coughing, or something. I was always so stressed, because then your day would be ruined because you couldn’t put him in kindergarten. She was like Trunchbull in ‘Matilda.’ Then, one day, she was smiling at me, and she said, ‘I didn’t know you were a famous director—I saw you on TV last night!’ From that day on, even if my kid was coughing like crazy, it was, like, ‘No, no, he’s fine, he’s not sick.’ And I realized—she was judging by the car. All the people coming from the luxury cars would be spared. In my case, I compensated for the car because I was on TV.”
Having delivered this Romanian parable, Jude went on his way. A few minutes later, from somewhere underground, he texted me a news item showing a black-and-white photograph of a crane digging into an enormous pile of rubble, with onlookers standing nearby. It was the forty-ninth anniversary of the earthquake. As I looked out from my car window, stuck in traffic, it was hard to discern its impact. Or maybe its impact was everywhere. ♦