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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,...

At just around midnight in the capital of Romania, film producer Ada Solomon got a call that threatened the life of her entire movie. Her docu-drama depicting a reenactment of one of the worst atrocities in Romania’s history was going to be shut down by the town’s vice mayor. And there was nothing she could do to stop it.

“I had, for one hour and a half, in the middle of [Revolution Square], the most horrible discussion I ever had in my life,” Solomon told TheWrap’s Steve Pond at a Q&A on Thursday following a screening of “I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History as Barbarians,” a film about the 1941 mass murder of tens of thousands of Jews on the Eastern Front by Romanian forces.

“Barbarians,” Romania’s entry into the Oscar foreign film race, follows theater director Mariana (Ioana Iacob) as she prepares a...

Radu Jude’s latest film won the Grand Prix - Crystal Globe, whilst Robert Pattinson and Barry Levinson also collected awards.

The 53rd Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (June 29 - July 7) closed today with its annual awards ceremony.

Radu Jude’s latest film “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” won the Grand Prix - Crystal Globe, whilst Robert Pattinson and Barry Levinson also collected awards.

Scroll down for full list of winners

“Barbarians” was selected by grand jury comprising Mark Cousins, Zrinka Cvitešić, Marta Donzelli, Zdeněk Holý and Nanouk Leopold. The Crystal Globe comes with $25,000 prize money.

Inverted commas withstanding, “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” seems like an awfully long and pretentious thing to call a film. Indeed, it might even suggest that something long and pretentious will be awaiting any viewer of Radu Jude’s latest creation but thankfully, in this case at very least, only one of those adjectives is true.

At 140 minutes, Barbarians (as it will be referred to from here) is indeed rather long, especially when considering that one could easily describe it as a drawn-out dialectic on the responsibility of nations to confront whatever atrocities their government and populous committed in the past. So how on earth is Barbarians so funny and compelling? Well, one reason might be that it’s a movie by Radu Jude, a Romanian New Wave filmmaker who has managed to operate just outside the main spotlight of his gilded colleagues,...

To fully deconstruct Romanian director Radu Jude’s meta-on-meta “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” (the quote marks are part of the title) would require page upon page of single-spaced footnotes, swathes of Hannah Arendt, a deft repackaging of Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” and a crash course in Romanian anti-Semitism and the nation’s participation in World War II, amid formal nods to Godard, Straub-Huillet, and Marxist critical theory, while martial music plays in the background. Clocking in at an unwieldy 140 minutes, Jude’s extraordinary opus can be overly didactic and unapologetically intellectual at times, but it is also startling —a provocative, sarcastic, and momentous act of interrogation between the past and the present that escalates to an impasse, with the hands of each locked around the neck of the other.

In a military museum, in front of a...

Radu Jude’s “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians,” which has its world premiere Monday in Karlovy Vary Film Festival’s main competition, has ruffled as many feathers in his native Romania as the film’s central character does in the town where she is staging a historical reenactment of a chapter from the Holocaust.

In a country where many still refuse to discuss its role as a Nazi ally – in common with several others in Europe – the subject is still raw, says the writer/director. Jude, who won the best director award at the Berlin Film Festival for “Aferim!,” focusing on 19th-century life in Jewish settlements, made “Barbarians” as a co-production with France, Bulgaria, Germany and the Czech Republic. Beta Cinema is handling world sales rights.

Did you face political pressure not to explore this subject as your director character does? How did you handle that?...

There are a multitude of reasons why any film may get unfairly overlooked. It could be a lack of marketing resources to provide a substantial push, or, due to a minuscule roll-out, not enough critics and audiences to be the champions it might require. It could simply be the timing of the picture itself; even in the world of studio filmmaking, some features take time to get their due. With an increasingly crowded marketplace, there are more reasons than ever that something might not find an audience and, as with last year, we’ve rounded up the releases that deserved more attention.

Note that all of the below films made less than $1 million at the domestic box office at the time of posting — VOD figures are not accounted for, as they normally aren’t made public — and are, for the most part, left out of most year-end conversations. Sadly, most...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit the interwebs. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

Aferim! (Radu Jude)

Leave it to a Romanian director to make a movie that best expresses the dangers of the dyed-in-the-wool mindset of modern America. Culled partly from historical documents, Aferim! is a twisted history lesson whose messages transcend its insular time period of 19th-century Romania. Its story concerns Constable Costandin (Teodor Corban) and his son, Ionita (Mihai Comanoiu), who chase after a wanted Gypsy slave...

Leave it to a Romanian director to make a movie that best expresses the dangers of the dyed-in-the-wool mindset of modern America. Culled partly from historical documents, Aferim! is a twisted history lesson whose messages transcend its insular time period of 19th-century Romania. Its story concerns Constable Costandin (Teodor Corban) and his son, Ionita (Mihai Comanoiu), who chase after a wanted Gypsy slave for a large bounty offered by Boyar Iordache Cîndescu (Alexandru Dabija), a local noble. But even embedded in a timeline that’s centuries away, the story is strikingly relevant in showing how people maintain blinders in the face of inhumanity.

Directed by Radu Jude and shot in a stark black-and-white, Aferim! is at once playful and searingly serious with its snapshot of slavery and eye-for-eye justice. Jude has a wry, acidic wit not unlike Roy Andersson. But more often, the film’s roundabout musings on justice recall...

The American Film Institute announced today the films that will screen in the World Cinema, Breakthrough, Midnight, Shorts and Cinema’s Legacy programs at AFI Fest 2015 presented by Audi.

AFI Fest will take place November 5 – 12, 2015, in the heart of Hollywood. Screenings, Galas and events will be held at the historic Tcl Chinese Theatre, the Tcl Chinese 6 Theatres, Dolby Theatre, the Lloyd E. Rigler Theatre at the Egyptian, the El Capitan Theatre and The Hollywood Roosevelt.

World Cinema showcases the most acclaimed international films of the year; Breakthrough highlights true discoveries of the programming process; Midnight selections will grip audiences with terror; and Cinema’s Legacy highlights classic movies and films about cinema. World Cinema and Breakthrough selections are among the films eligible for Audience Awards. Shorts selections are eligible for the Grand Jury Prize, which qualifies the winner for Academy Award®consideration. This year’s Shorts jury features filmmaker Janicza Bravo,...