Kontinental ’25
Radu Jude / Romania / 2025 / 109 min
A pitch-black comedy from Transylvania where a woman's guilty conscience sends her on a tour of an ex-socialist universe of religion, nationalism and questionable morals.
No one makes movies like Radu Jude – and few make them at the same pace! The dark side of reality is never far away in his satirical fictions from his homeland, which skewer the corrupt zeitgeist on a low budget but with infernal humor and great ingenuity.
Hungarian Orsolya works as a bailiff in the Transylvanian city of Cluj. One day she arrives with the police to get Ion, an elderly, homeless bottle collector, to move out of the warm basement room he has taken up residence in. The building is to be demolished to make way for the big new hotel Kontinental Boutique. Ion is allowed to pack his things, but when Orsolya and the police return, he has taken his own life.
This is the start of a tragicomic tour of Cluj with Orsolya as she desperately seeks out friends, colleagues and priests to make them understand her moral quandary and to get rid of her guilty conscience. But it’s not so easy in a city full of nationalism, religion, a housing crisis and a flexible morality.