CTC | directed by Radu Jude | 2021 | Romania | 106 Mins
WINNER of the Golden Bear for Best Film – 71st Berlinale (Berlin International Film Festival)
In Cinemas November 25.
A video goes viral. It shows a man and a woman having sex while wearing masks. The woman is, nevertheless, identified. Too bad she is a teacher and supposed to be a role model. And this, moreover, in a (post-socialist but ultimately any) society that is about to get lost in a social network discourse of would-be healing squeaky-clean attitudes, pseudo-political knowing-it-all, sanctimonious chauvinism and grotesque conspiracy theories. Everyone has an opinion. The debate turns into a tribunal – about consensual sex, pornography and more.
Always up for innovative cinematic experiments, Radu Jude has crafted from this constellation an intelligent, satirical triptych: with its nonchalantly precise camerawork and manic humour found in the stress of everyday life on Bucharest’s streets, the first part shows us what contemporary cinema at the documentary-fiction interface can look like. The second part is an offbeat series of laconic, static images intended as an encyclopaedia of the symbols of our time. The film’s grand – albeit open-ended – finale is a discussion held at the school in which judgement is passed on our heroine’s right to exist.
Palace Pentridge
Pivotonian Cinema
Palace Central
Dendy Newtown
The Ritz
Palace James St
TAS
The State, Hobart
BERLINALE JURY STATEMENT
“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.”
REVIEWS
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
It’s a daring and hilarious cinematic gamble that gives a justifiable middle finger to the sheer inanity of the Western world.”
Indiewire
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
Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn is one fo the most important pieces of cinema in the 21st century.. you certainly cannot or should not ignore it.
High on Films
It’s a wholly inventive and amusing film that crashes societal norms against one another with sharp humour and navigates its politics with real bite and imagination.
Little White Lies
It is an incendiary, playful, and wonderfully exasperated piece of filmmaking that shows a director trying to draw some threads of sense from our current malaise.
The Film Stage
AWARDS
Berlin International Film Festival 2021
Winner: Golden Berlin Bear Best Film
Indie Lisboa International Independent Film Festival 2021
Nominee: Silvestre Award Best Feature Film
Jameson CineFest – Miskolc International Film Festival 2021
Nominee: Emeric Pressburger Prize Best Feature Film
Jerusalem Film Festival 2021
Nominee: Best International Film
Pula Film Festival 2021
Winner: Golden Arena Best Film, Croatian Minority Coproductions
Winner: Best Croatian Contribution to a Minority Co-Production
Nominee: Golden Arena International Competition: Best Film
San Sebastián International Film Festival 2021
Nominee: FIPRESCI Film of the Year
Nominee: Zabaltegi-Tabakalera Prize
Transilvania International Film Festival 2021
Nominee: Romanian Days Award Best Feature Film
