Brlinale competition-»continental ’25«: hanged on the heating

One of the most radical directors that Europe currently has to offer is the Romanian filmmaker and author Radu Jude. Radically, the film language means less than Judes, unambiguous party for the damned of the earth or Romania. His disrespectful charges in vulgar capitalism Eastern European character brought him the golden bear for the grotesque “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” four years ago. Now he is back in the competition with »continental ’25«.

Jew has not lost his sense of grotesque situations with which traditional (visual) expectations are deconstructed. Right in the first scene we see a homeless and visibly sick man collapsing bottles through an amusement park, while around him wiggle the heads with the heads and mechanically roaring it around him. The man later changes through the crowd, through a world with which he and which has nothing to do with him.

However, the main character is Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), a Hungarian -born bailiff in the Transylvanian Klausenburg, who is supposed to execute the evacuation order against the homeless. This has quartered in the heating cellar of a house that wants to tear down a real estate company to build a luxury hotel there. Orsolya does her duty, and while she is waiting with the police officers with a coffee that the man grabs his things, he hangs himself with a wire on the radiator of his rod. Jew is nasty enough not to withhold the details: the viewer can follow without a picture, but with clay how difficult it is.

For the police officers involved and for the employees of the real estate company, this death is only a small disorder in the operating process; There is nothing to complain about, they are only afraid of the press who exploits such an event for their own purposes. Only Orsolya cannot simply go to the agenda. The tragic consequences of her actions trigger a moral crisis with her. Desperately, she sends her family on vacation alone and makes various attempts to make it clear about herself and their actions. But does anyone want to know about it at all or understand them? “Continental ’25” is now becoming a discourse area. In long planning sequences we pursue Orsolya’s conversations with our colleagues, her best friend, a former student of her, the pastor and others.

This is very brittle, but extremely illuminating, the viewer is precisely confronted with the topics in the conversations, about which you usually prefer not to think so precisely. At least not if you feel belonging to the middle class and worries about the preservation of social status. Legally, she is on the safe side, it is always assured that the moral dilemma is no longer. So Jew confronts us again and again with the hybris and mendacity of bourgeois well -being, which always suppresses that one’s own well -being is based on the exploitation of others. In addition, you also learn a lot about the constitution of Romanian society; Nobody seems to make more illusions there about the moral state of the elites. From rampant nationalism towards the Hungarian minority to the fact that most real estate developers are former security employees, Jew puts his finger in the wounds that are wounding.

In the 1970s and 1980s, many Eastern European films, especially the early films by Krzysztof Kieślowski, referred to the “cinema of moral restlessness”. This meant films who ask about the responsibility of the individual in society. With his moral rigorism, Jew is joined in this cinematic tradition. At the end of his film, we see a sequence of still images with monotonous new building projects for the middle class, as they are becoming more and more overforming into the landscape and overforming structures. The downside of poverty is a growing middle and upper class- it is the one that makes the city proliferate because its space and space requirements are much higher. This end has little to do with the previous action – and therefore invites you to think about what makes good life.

»Continental ’25«, Rumänien 2025. Regie: Radu Jude. Mit: Eszter Top, Gabriel Spahiu, Adonis Tanta, Mardare’s Oan. 109 Min.
February 21, 12.30 p.m., Haus der Berliner Festival; February 22, 10:15 p.m., HKW1; February 23, 6.45 p.m., Uber Eats Music Hall