Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World (2023)

[Cremildo]

Berlin Golden Bear winner Radu Jude (“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn”) is set to begin production in Romania on his next feature, Variety can reveal.

“A Case History” analyzes the relations between individuals and multinational companies in the mad dash of new Romanian capitalism, starting from the real story of preparing and shooting a problematic work safety video. Principal photography is slated to begin in summer or early fall.

“The film is composed of two parts which respond to each other, forming a diptych of sorts,” Jude told Variety. “Each of them explores a certain aspect of the main theme, and the final picture is obtained by juxtaposing the two of them in what we can call ‘a tale of cinema and economy.’” It is a film about work relations, but also a film about images and the way they are made and their place in society.

The first part of “A Case History” is a road movie which follows Angela, an overworked, 35-year-old production assistant working for a Romanian production company, as she drives around Bucharest on assignment for a large multinational corporation. “This part will be also a kind of dialogue with a not so well-known film from 1981, ‘Angela Moves On,’ by Lucian Bratu, which also has a woman driver in its center,” said Jude. “I will shoot in many of the locations of that film, I will have its main characters playing secondary characters here, and parts of it will enter my film as well.”

The second portion takes place the next day and follows several characters from the first part in “a kind of a making-of for a corporate film,” said the director. “This challenges a bit, I hope, the notion of what a story usually is. Plus, the characters will tell a lot of smaller stories and anecdotes to each other, so the film will be very rich from a storytelling point of view.” source