Kontinental '25

Radu Jude shot Kontinental '25 in Cluj on an iPhone in a matter of weeks and took the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at the Berlinale in 2025 — his fourth prize from the festival that gave him the Golden Bear in 2021. The title comes from the hotel the story circles, and the film is dedicated, in Jude's usual manner, to a specific piece of Romanian civic hypocrisy.

Eszter Tompa plays Orsolya, a bailiff of Hungarian descent whose job is to carry out an eviction and whose conscience will not accept the paperwork as an answer. The film follows her through a series of conversations — with her mother, a priest, an old lover, a delivery driver — in which everyone offers a reason why nothing is anyone's fault, and each explanation is worse than the last.

It belongs with Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World and I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians in Jude's ongoing account of contemporary Romania: talky, digressive, deliberately cheap-looking, and much funnier than a description of the plot suggests. Rossellini's Europa '51 is the acknowledged model.