Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World by Radu Jude

With this blistering, acidly funny, rollercoaster ride of a film, in which production assistant Angela tours the troubled heart and soul of Romania, Radu Jude ended up in many top-10 lists of 2024, and rightfully so.
Angela’s employer commissions her to create a corporate film for a ruthless Austrian business, promoting safety measures and featuring testimonials from workers disabled on the job due to neglecting safety precautions, all for a mere thousand euros. Angela must rush across Bucharest to gather these testimonies. The film is intercut with scenes from Angela Goes On, a 1981 Romanian film about a taxi driver, providing a visually and thematically rich contrast, especially given its creation during Ceausescu’s dictatorship.
Part of the second generation of the filmmakers that have come to define the New Romanian Cinema, Radu Jude (1977) has quickly become one of the country’s most prolific and important directors. Unfaltering in his continuing exploration of film language and the cinematic representation of history, he’s directed over thirty short and feature length works in just 15 years, and received awards at all major international film festivals (Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, Rotterdam). Notable films in his filmography are his first shortfilm and claim to fame The Tube with a Hat (2006), first feature The Happiest Girl in the World (2009), Aferim! (2015) that won him Best Director at the Berlinale, and his most recent feature Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn (2021) that was awarded with the Golden Bear at the Berlinale.