Narrative Feature | Romania/Czech Republic/France/Bulgaria/Germany | 2018 | Romanian | 140 minutes
In the latest provocation from Romanian director Radu Jude, local theater director Mariana Marin (Ioana Iacob) prepares to stage a public recreation of the 1941 Odessa Massacre, an often-ignored ethnic cleansing in which tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews were murdered at the hands of Romanian soldiers. As Mariana attempts to push back on both calls for censorship from a city representative looking for a more traditional display of nationalist pride and a burgeoning mutiny amongst her cast of local volunteers, Jude crafts a timely and constantly engaging examination of the ways in which barbarism is not only defined by its perpetrators, but by those insistent on pushing it to the sidelines of history as well.
