By RADU JUDE & CHRISTIAN FERENCZ-FLATZ | ROMANIA • 2024 • COLOUR, B&W • 71 min • 16:9 / 5.1
Teaser
Synopsis
Eight Postcards from Utopia is a found-footage documentary assembled exclusively out of post-socialist Romanian advertisements. In bringing together these documents of Romania’s long transition period, they are made to speak about life, love and death, about the body and human frailty, about nature and the supernatural, about recent history, and, of course, about socialism and capitalism. A film between found poetry and an outdated encyclopaedia, between trash art and Summa theologiae.
DIRECTORS’ STATEMENT
This experimental film is assembled exclusively out of Romanian advertisements produced during the post-socialist transition period. Having served a country newly emerged out of an economy of shortage as introduction to contemporary commodity culture, these ads all seem to communicate with one another despite their striking differences in style and product: they all depict a coherent fantasy world of fulfilled desires. Exploring the various facets of this utopian dream world with the toolkit of montage, the film turns the fictional and often ludicrous medium of advertising clips into a magnifying glass for the society’s desires, beliefs, hopes and fears.
The film’s structure is episodic, split into short chapters, each focusing on a specific aspect of the advertised utopian world. The first chapter retells the national history from its origins to the present by using its depictions in post-socialist advertisements. The second chapter is devoted to money, the lifeblood of capitalist economy, but also an ever-present object of fascination in advertisements. The third chapter assembles images of labs, scientists and scientific explanations from ads in order to lay bare the advertisements’ pretence at rationality. The fourth chapter explores the advertisements’ infatuation with the supernatural. The fifth chapter follows a human biography, from birth to death as depicted in ads. The sixth chapter is devoted to the language games of advertisements, while the seventh chapter deals with their body language and their gestures. The eight chapter deals with representations of gender and their mutual relationship in ads. And the concluding epilogue uses images of nature from commercials to voice ecological concerns and reflect on the impeding apocalypse.
DIRECTORS’ BIOGRAPHIES
Radu Jude is a Romanian director and screenwriter. His feature debut The Happiest Girl in the World (2009) was selected for more than 50 international film festivals. Titles such as Everybody in Our Family (2012), Aferim! (2015), Scarred Hearts (2016), I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018), Uppercase Print (2020) followed and won multiple awards worldwide. In 2021, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn won the Golden Bear in Berlinale 2021. His latest feature, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, has recently won the Special Jury Prize at the Locarno Film Festival and was the Romanian entry for the Academy Awards’ International Feature Film category.
Christian Ferencz-Flatz is a philosopher, currently affiliated as a researcher at the Alexandru Dragomir Insititute for Philosophy in Bucharest. He teaches at the National University of Theatre and Film in Bucharest. His research concerns phenomenology, critical theory, the philosophy of history, film- and media philosophy. With Julian Hanich, he edited the journal issue Studia Phaenomenologica XVI: Film and Phenomenology (2016). His latest monographs include: Critical Theory and Phenomenology. Polemics, Appropriations, Perspectives (Springer, 2023) and Filmul ca situație socială / Film as a Social Situation (Tact, 2018). He published numerous essays and research articles in philosophical and film scholarly journals and translated into Romanian key theoretical works by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer. He is currently developing a research project devoted to post-socialist advertising.
Crew
- Directors: Radu Jude & Christian Ferencz-Flatz
- Editor: Cătălin Cristuțiu
- Producer: Alexandru Teodorescu
- Executive producer: Ana Gheorghe
- Sound by: Ștefan Ruxandra
- Sound mix by: Alexandru Dumitru
FESTIVALS& AWARDS
- World Premiere at Locarno Film Festival 2024 – Fuori Concorso
- Special Mention of The Beeld & Geluid IDFA ReFrame Award at IDFA 2024
Selections:
- DMZ (South Korea, September 2024)- Essay section
- FIDBA (Argentina, October 2024)
- DocLisboa (Portugal, October 2024)
- Festival du Nouveau Cinema (Canada, October 2024)- Histoire de cinema
- BFI London Film Festival (UK, October 2024)
- Viennale (Austria, October 2024)
- Sao Paulo IFF (Brazil, October 2024)
- Jihlava IDFF (Czech Republic, October 2024)
- El Gouna IFF (Egypt, November 2024)- Out of competition
- Gijon IFF (Spain, November 2024)
- Night Visions FF (Finland, November 2024)
- Torino FF ( Italy, November 2024)
- Les Ecrans Documentaires ( France, November 2024)
- IFFI Goa (India, November 2024) – Out of competiton
- Auteur FF (Serbia, November 2024)- Brave Balkan Section
- Watch Docs (Poland, December 2024)
- Athens Avant-Garde FF (Greece, December 2024)- Retrospective Radu Jude
- Trieste FF (Italy, January 2025)
- Dublin IFF (Irland, March 2025)
- Vilnius IFF (Lithuania, March 2025)
- MoMa Doc Fortnight (USA, 2025)
