“The Romanian Film Centre is run by an idiot,” filmmaker Radu Jude, one of the eastern European country’s most successful recent international exports concluded at the tail end of a masterclass session he chaired at this year’s Locarno Film Festival.
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Jude name-checked Anca Mitran, head of the Romanian Film Centre, during the session as he answered a question about what he described as the current difficulties of landing financing from institutions for experimental or unconventional projects.
“They [Romanian Film Centre] will compare finished films with the screenplay a filmmaker submitted, and if there are any changes they will ask for their money back,” Jude told the enthusiastic audience, which included veteran producer Ted Hope. Hope is part of Locarno’s industry advisory board.
Jude returns to Locarno this year after snagging the Special Jury Prize in 2023 with Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. He will debut two films in competition at this year’s festival, Eight Postcards From Utopia, an experimental found-footage documentary, and Sleep #2 , a meditative tribute to Andy Warhol.
Elsewhere during the session, Jude teased his future projects, telling the industry crowd that he is currently working on a Dracula feature.
“I am from Romania. My father is actually from Transylvania. It’s time that someone from Romania does a Dracula film. It’s only Hollywood that has done it 1,000 times,” he said. “We shouldn’t let Hollywood dominate our Dracula.”
Jude has previously teased his Dracula film, which is currently under the name Dracula Park on IMDb. Ilinca Manolache, the star of Jude’s last film Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World , told AnOther magazine during an interview that she read the film’s script and described it as “brilliant, amazing, funny, and gorgeous.”
Jude continued to say he is also shooting an independent feature and has many other projects “in preparation and in different forms of financing and co-production financing.”
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“I also have this French film I was proposed by a producer,” he added. “I say yes to everything, so I said yes to him. So there are things happening. If one of these five happens I will be happy.”
We shared a first-look clip of Eight Postcards From Utopia earlier this week . Jude directed the film with philosopher Christian Ferencz-Flatz. The film’s synopsis reads: Eight Postcards from Utopia is a found-footage documentary assembled exclusively out of post-socialist Romanian advertisements. Drawing from the debris of Romania’s long transition period, the film speaks about love and death, the human body and its frailty, the natural and the supernatural, and of course, socialism and capitalism.
Jude told us the film is “episodic” with a narrative split into short chapters, each focusing on a “specific aspect of the advertised utopian world.”
“Exploring the various facets of this utopian dream world with the toolkit of montage, the film turns the fictional and often ludicrous medium of advertising clips into a magnifying glass for the society’s desires, beliefs, hopes, and fears,” Jude said in a statement.
The film was produced by Alexandru Teodorescu with editing by Cătălin Cristuțiu, sound by Ștefan Ruxandra, and a sound mix by Alexandru Dumitru. Heretic is on world sales.
The Locarno Film Festival runs until August 17.
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