Kontinental '25 (2025)
Genre: Drama / Comedy
Duration: 109 minuten
Country:
Romania
Directed by: Radu Jude
Stars: Eszter Tompa, Gabriel Spahiu and Adonis Tanța
IMDb score:
6,7 (2.604)
Releasedate: 24 September 2025
Kontinental '25 plot
In Transylvania, the bailiff Orsolya throws a homeless man who was living in a cellar out onto the street. The man sees no other way than to end his life. Orsolya searches for ways to deal with her feelings of guilt, but finds no understanding in her environment. She increasingly longs for reassurance and confirmation.
Reviews & comments
mrklm
-
- 12557 messages
- 10566 votes
Public prosecutor Orsolya [Eszteer Tompa] is under fire in Cluj, the capital of Transylvania. The immediate cause is an incident involving a homeless man [Gabriel Spahiu], which has resulted in a flood of (online) insults and death threats. Jude incorporates a wealth of social criticism into a series of statically filmed scenes in which Orsolya talks to various people. The opening scene with the homeless man in a strange dinosaur theme park is memorable. What follows has nothing to do with cinema and (despite the solid acting) would probably have been barely passable as a play itself.
Translated from Dutch · View original
Fransman
-
- 3100 messages
- 2323 votes
First of all: Radu Jude always comes up with something special. No two of his films are alike. It is always a matter of thinking and puzzling over what he presents to you. Which is not to say that I always fully understand or can appreciate his films. I have highly regarded some of his films, but I have my doubts about this one. This film centers on Cluj, the capital of Transylvania, focusing particularly on the still simmering tensions between a part of the Romanian population and the small Hungarian minority. For Cluj was once a flourishing Hungarian university city (until 1918). "They stole Transylvania from us," the protagonist's Hungarian mother says at one point.
This Orsolya is a bailiff, and she has been tasked with removing a semi-homeless man from the basement of an apartment complex. She carries out her duties with due care and attempts to offer a solution for the man. Nevertheless, he commits suicide while the bailiff awaits the eviction. The woman holds the man's death against her deeply and is consequently thrown off balance. She seeks solace from her husband, who mainly wants to go on vacation, from a friend, from a former student, and finally from an Orthodox priest. None of them can truly comfort her. The film concludes with images of new construction projects in the city, which I struggled to place.
The student who just rambled on endlessly and mainly wanted to sleep with her gave me the creeps. The friend did too, actually, with her aid projects for poor people, whom she actually detests. And finally, the priest's sanctimonious speeches. It just goes on and on; there was no end to it. I could sympathize with the woman herself, though. She should have chosen a different profession, I think to myself. She felt the same way, by the way. Cluj is a beautiful city, though.
Translated from Dutch · View original
De filosoof
-
- 2594 messages
- 1780 votes
The film is a homage to and a contemporary version of Rossellini's 1952 film Europe '51, but shares the same style as Jude's other films: almost embarrassingly realistic with a somewhat mosaic-like view of contemporary, likewise fragmented society, featuring plenty of social criticism but also a great deal of humor. I love his style, and this film, too, has much to enjoy, although it might be a bit slower and heavier than the others: it concerns a bailiff who feels guilty about a homeless man who hangs himself after she evicts him from his residence, after which she primarily engages in conversations about matters such as why God allows so much misery in the world and the meaning of life—while electronic gadgets literally and figuratively get in his way—but also about issues such as the fraught history and the difficult relationship between the Hungarians and the Romanians. Things frequently get intellectual – such as the student’s Zen Buddhist lessons on enlightenment and the priest’s theological treatise on the sanctity of life – but a touch of absurdism that lightens the heavy subject matter is never far away.
The film is something of an inverted or spiritual Odyssey: she sends her family on vacation while she stays in the city herself to search, both within the city and in her mind, for what to do with life or to reconcile herself with it, while all around her materialism (or capitalism) relentlessly and cynically builds everything up and crushes the citizen, like the Chinese worker in the parcel factory the student describes.
Translated from Dutch · View original
Corporate & Media
Realtimes Network
Innovatieweg 20C
7007 CD, Doetinchem, Netherlands
+31(315)-764002
