CTC | directed by Radu Jude | 2021 | Romania | 106 Mins
Winner of the prestigious Golden Bear at the 2021 Berlin Film Festival, BAD LUCK BANGING (OR LOONEY PORN) is an outrageous Romanian comedy satirising the sensitivities of modern culture.
Emi (Katia Pascariu), a school teacher, finds her career and reputation under threat when a personal sex tape is leaked to the Internet. Forced to meet the parents demanding her dismissal, Emi refuses to surrender to their pressure.
Director Radu Jude (Aferim!) delivers an incendiary mix of unconventional form, irreverent humor and scathing commentary on hypocrisy and prejudice in our societies in a film of three loosely connected parts: a walk in the city of Bucharest, a playful essay on obscenities, all culminating in an incendiary comic confrontation.
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
