News

Dracula is back on the big screen with a vengeance, courtesy of none other than Romanian provocateur Radu Jadu (Kontinental ’25, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World). Befitting the iconoclastic filmmaker’s reputation, of course, he is taking you on a bloody wild and absurd, dare we say — insane — cinematic ride to explore the legendary cinema myth in Dracula, world premiering in the competition program of the 78th edition of the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland on Aug. 10. In the process, he aims to not only dissect Dracula, but cinema itself.

In fact, with the movie made on Dracula’s home turf, namely Transylvania, Jude really sinks his teeth into the most famous vampire and different dimensions of his image, as well as AI. After all, the film shows a young filmmaker working with an AI system to craft various filmic takes on Dracula.

It is one of the minor miracles in the world of international art-house cinema that the movies of Romania’s iconoclast and idiosyncratic director Radu Jude have found a wider audience. Among the directors of the Romanian New Wave, which kicked off two decades ago and shows no sign of ebbing, Jude is arguably the most radical and unpredictable. He’s made a coming-of-age comedy (The Happiest Girl in the World), an historic western (Aferim!), a Kafka-esque docudrama (Uppercase Print), a Covid-era sex satire (Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, which won the Berlinale Golden Bear in 2021), a three-hour black-and-white feminist drama (Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World), and a found-footage documentary, Eight Postcards from Utopia, assembled exclusively out of post-socialist Romanian advertisements.

Jude’s latest, Kontinental ’25 is another stylistic swerve, an absurdist comedy-drama about Romania’s housing crisis and the country’s conflicted middle class.