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Radu Jude’s Kontinental ’25 is unmistakably his own. That’s evident in the film’s self-derisive humor, caustic social critique, surreal interventions in everyday situations that are taken to their ridiculous limit, and an intrepid revisiting of history so specific to Romania that it ends up gaining a universal, almost fable-like force.

Jude’s cinema isn’t exactly absurdist, though it exposes the absurdities of a present reeling from the unresolved injustices of the past. In Kontinental ’25, set in the Cluj area of Transylvania, a Hungarian-Romanian bailiff, Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), is guilt-ridden after evicting an older man, penniless due to drinking and gambling, from his basement studio, after months of squatting, which led the man to commit suicide. Though Orsolya feels bad to have kicked the man out, she was just doing her job—and, besides, the man’s unsanitary living quarters needed to be demolished to make...

The highly prolific Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude has, in the past year alone, directed two fictional features, co-directed a feature-length documentary, and released a one-hour experimental film made entirely of webcam footage shot at Andy Warhol’s grave.

Unlike his more famous fellow countryman, the Palme d’Or winner Cristian Mungiu, whose intricately crafted dramas come out every four or five years, Jude likes to make movies quick and dirty, as if his productions had a hard time keeping up with all the ideas racing through his head. His last two features — Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn — were both ripped-from-the-headlines satires that felt fast, fresh and utterly contemporary, like they were shot on the fly.

The same could be said for his latest morality tale, Kontinental ’25, which has more of a universal bent yet makes references...

After a major 2024 with the wider release of his blistering satire Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (which nabbed a spot in our top 10) and the premiere of a pair of smaller-scale, experimental films, Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude is gearing up for another big year. His forthcoming Dracula film earned much anticipation on our 2025 preview and now he has revealed he’s finished another surprise feature as well.

His new feature Continental ’25 was “filmed independently, low-budget, in Cluj and Florești,” Jude tells Films in Frame. Described as “a moral dilemma post festum,” the filmmaker adds it’s “a modest attempt at dialogue with some themes from Rossellini’s Europa ’51.” The cast features Eszter Tompa, Gabriel Spahiu, Adonis Tanța, Oana Mardare, Annamária Biluska, Marius Damian, and Ilinca Manolache. See the first look below.

When it comes to his vampire feature, it was originally going by Dracula Park,...