Aiming his satirical arrow at the contradictions of religion, Radu Jude brings thorny questions of faith down to earth in this darkly ironic short. From tax forms and rush-hour traffic to customer’s woes, the daily travails of an ordinary priest are rendered amusingly, farcically transactional.
The pendulum of ideology keeps on swinging in Radu Jude’s short, inspired by Sergei Eisenstein’s dialectical montage. Interweaving first-hand footage with a fictional retelling of a famous execution, this visual séance of Romania’s past tackles cinema’s complicity in obscuring historical truths.
Corneliu Porumboiu’s minimalist doc might feel as simple as chatting during a match, yet he creates a super-charged situation where audiences come to dissect the hidden meaning lurking behind the images. A captivating look at Romanian history, father-son relationships, and football.
