CTC | directed by Radu Jude | 2021 | Romania | 106 Mins
WINNER of the Golden Bear for Best Film – 71st Berlinale (Berlin International Film Festival)
Schoolteacher, Emi, finds her reputation under threat after a personal sex tape is uploaded onto the internet. Forced to meet the parents demanding her dismissal, Emi refuses to surrender. Radu Jude (director) delivers an incendiary mix of unconventional form, irreverent humour and scathing commentary on hypocrisy and prejudice in our societies.
“The Golden Bear goes to a film which has that rare and essential quality of a lasting art work. It captures on screen the very content and essence, the mind and body, the values and the raw flesh of our present moment in time. Of this very moment of human existence. It does so by provoking the spirit of our time (i.e., zeitgeist), by slapping it, by challenging it to a duel. And while doing that, it also challenges this present moment in cinema, shaking, with the same camera movement, our social and our cinematic conventions. It is an elaborated film as well as a wild one, clever and childish, geometrical and vibrant, imprecise in the best way. It attacks the spectator, evokes disagreement, but leaves no one with a safety distance.”
BERLINALE JURY STATEMENT
“A […] provocative pandemic polemic […] Jude remains a boldly original voice in modern European cinema, with serious things to say and increasingly adventurous ways of saying them.”
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
“It’s a daring and hilarious cinematic gamble that gives a justifiable middle finger to the sheer inanity of the Western world.”
INDIEWIRE
“This provocative and unapologetically profane Buñuelian prank [is] one of the first examples of a genuine auteur work to emerge in a world upended by COVID-19.”
VARIETY
