Film
I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians
Îmi este indiferent dacă în istorie vom intra ca barbari
Mariana, a theatre director, is staging a public re-enactment of the 1941 Odessa massacre in a Bucharest square, using amateur performers and military hardware. The city official funding it would prefer a different history, and says so at length.
About
Radu Jude won the Crystal Globe at Karlovy Vary in 2018 with a film whose title is a quotation from Mihai Antonescu, the Romanian deputy prime minister who in 1941 authorised what followed. Jude has spent his career excavating the parts of Romanian history the country has agreed not to discuss, and this is his most direct attempt.
Ioana Iacob plays Mariana, a director rehearsing a public re-enactment of the Odessa massacre — in which Romanian troops murdered tens of thousands of Jews — for a square in central Bucharest. Most of the film is argument: with her actors, with her lover, with the city official played by Alexandru Dabija who arrives armed with counter-examples and a reasonable tone. Jude cuts in archive photographs and long quotations from Isaac Babel and Hannah Arendt, and shoots the rehearsals on 16mm.
It is funny in the specific Romanian New Wave register — bureaucratic, deadpan, exhausting by design — and then it stages the re-enactment itself, in front of a real crowd whose reactions were filmed as they happened. Few films have made the mechanics of national forgetting this legible, and fewer have done it while being this entertaining to argue with.
Top Cast
Ioana Iacob
Mariana
Alexandru Bogdan
Traian
Alexandru Dabija
Movila
Ilinca Manolache
Șerban Pavlu
Awards, Festivals & Mentions
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Winner — Crystal Globe — Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (2018)
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Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2018 — In Competition
Featured In
- 10 Must-Watch Romanian Films 29 August 2026