Following the release of his latest film, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, FILMHOUNDS had the chance to talk with Radu Jude about film as college, filmmaking as haikus, and the impending end of everything we love and hold dear.

Over the past two decades, Radu Jude has become one of Romania's most prolific auteurs, with his black humour and sharp satirical chops increasingly finding their way to international audiences. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is no exception, offering a breakneck ride through modern malaise and its rapidly compounding contradictions. Just as Jude gave the middle finger when accepting the Special Jury Prize at the 2023 Locarno Film Festival, his latest film lifts the same finger to the gig economy, hyper-masculinity, and crucially: the Austrians.

In the film, we follow Angela (Ilinca Manolache), an overworked, underpaid production assistant who races us through the streets of Bucharest to pull together a workplace safety video in a single day. Simultaneously, Angela (Dorina Lazar) from Angela Moves On, a 1981 Romanian documentary film, is shown driving these same streets in her taxi cab, connecting modern-day Angela's mad dash with the intervening decades that gave rise to the absurdity of the present world. 

Soon we find that the workplace safety video is a sham; it's merely a PR stunt by a company seeking to blame their injured workers for the company's failings. In the course of Angela's daily madness, Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of the World introduces us to the signs of the ongoing apocalypse, signs with which we are all intimately familiar. Through this, we must confront our own complicity: the horrifying realisation that the world might end not with a bang but a whimper – and we are that whimper.

To get to this explosive realisation, Jude places us in a typical day of Angela. This everyday setting is one which Jude views as holding great potential for filmmakers.

 “I am more and more interested in showing things which are not spectacular in themselves… like regular things from the seasons, from nature, from life, and to transform them into poetry.”

According to Jude, this poetry of the every day can be viewed as a haiku.

“If the haiku is good, it doesn't show you something spectacular, it shows you what you already knew. But you didn't know that you knew it. This is the direction I tried to place myself into, in showing things which are not necessarily extraordinary but showing the extraordinariness of them.”

In his aim to turn the everyday into poetry, Jude describes filmmaking as a struggle to find form and meaning.

“Nothing came originally fully formed. On the contrary, it was a struggle to make the film and to conceive the filming in a way.”  

He likens his method to a collage, continually adding and adjusting elements to achieve a complex, layered narrative. It's from this struggle that the film appears.

“All my films are an expression… The films are a struggle to make, to find a way to make them, I don't know how to make them. And from the struggle, something appears.”

For Jude, the result of this struggle is a mosaic, a patchwork of different forms connected across time and place. He speaks of the desire to tell stories as the starting point with each element appearing as a byproduct of his desire to find a shape for them. As the number of elements increases, so does the complexity of filmmaking.

“The degree of complexity becomes very, very high. So high that in some cases, even you as the maker don't really understand and you cannot control it.”

In the 1980s film, Angela Goes On, Jude slows down both the film and audio, adding close-ups of people in the background. It's as if we're searching for something within these images of the past. What can we find through these images? It ties directly to the local history of Romania as a film made during the dictatorship of Ceaușescu.

“If you really look at it, you discover that it is shot in many cases in many places, documentary style, and in the background for a very, very short time the filmmaker captured some scenes which were not supposed to be there, according to censorship, like poorly clothed people, homeless people, people waiting in line for food etc.”

From drawing our attention to these unknown, unintentional extras we're given something new.

“Changing the speed of the film, changing the sound of the film, something new appears. It's a different experience.”

This offers the opportunity to change the form of the film itself.

“I think this is one of the possibilities of transforming fiction into documentary material, slowing it down so much that you're invited to watch it as documentary material in a way. When you're zooming so much into an image that you start to see the structure of it, digital or film, you see the image as an image, so it becomes a document in a way.”

With so many strands coming together, it would be easy for the complexity to become too much for both the filmmaker and audience, but this is part of the appeal for Jude.

“Even if there is a danger there, even when things might disintegrate. I think this danger is worth it, to make it.”

Danger is omnipresent in Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of The World. It appears in the form of an alarm, a green screen, and along the roads that drive Angela forward. Angela's only release is found through Bobita, the foul-mouthed alter-ego that she broadcasts live to her followers on TikTok. Despite its easy interpretation as a parody of Andrew Tate, the character which originated with Ilinca Manolache herself, came far before Tate's rise to prominence. 

“When I started to think of actresses for the first part, I immediately remembered Ilinca Manolache whom I worked with, in smaller parts for other films and in that moment, I remembered her avatar, because she was doing these Bobita avatar videos for TikTok and Instagram, during the lockdown. I think she was bored.”

“They became quite popular for a lot of people, especially young women, or women from the art world who see in it a kind of attack… like a feminist expression.”

However, this form of parody also finds itself as the subject of criticism, a nuance that Jude embraces, saying: 

“This expression, of course, is very on the edge because she told me that there were some more radical feminists that say, ‘Oh no, in this way you normalise the discourse and the speech, the hate speech, etc,' which well, I can understand their point of view, but they think that if we only do politically correct things, and very controlled things, art will become 100% boring and useless. What I like about this avatar is that it's very on the edge. She's criticising, but at the same time, there is something troubling about it.”

For Jude, it was an easy decision to bring Bobita aboard with Manolache.

“So when I decided to work with Ilinca, I immediately realised I wanted her to do that in the film and she said yes.”

The character of Bobita presented by Manolache remains largely unchanged from her lockdown shorts.

“I did the text and the staging for those, but they were along the lines of what she did before. So we did it together, so to speak.”

Bobita is crude, vulgar, and completely compelling as a shit-talking misogynist of the moment. This vulgarity is a crucial part of the character for Jude.

“Vulgarity is always an important issue because one of the things that art has always made was to extend the territory of non-vulgar or of things not considered vulgar.

“I think that one of the things that literature or cinema can do is to show that whatever the language, the possibility that the language has, is not vulgar, it can be seen in a different light. Also, what is considered highbrow or lowbrow is the same thing.”

This interplay between vulgarity in form and content is on full display here. Austrian corporate executives glitch out on Zoom while Bobita ducks off to the side to set the world to right in live filtered portrait mode. In such scenarios, the form can easily become the content itself, vulgarity included.

“Now, it's like the Zoom images or TikTok images are considered vulgar images, but I consider them noble images as well. They should have the same rights to exist as the quality images, so to speak.”

While admiring their potential for cinematic purposes, Jude also recognises them as a double-edged sword.

“I see the danger in these images and these platforms and in everything, so I'm aware of that and I'm aware of the fact that we don't know how to read images and how to understand them.”

For Jude, it is not a question of if he wants to use them but if he knows how to use them. He shares that he will explore these forms in two upcoming montage films.

“One is with the philosopher from Romania, Christian Ferencz-Flatz, and it's a film with advertising images from the 90s and early 2000s from Romania and that's an essay film.

“Another one is made only with recorded images from a certain surveillance camera. But it's not mine. So I recorded the screen on the computer. So it's a desktop film, you know?” 

However, Jude is still ultimately interested in the possibilities of narration, for the sake of story and character, with these new forms only being as useful as he can make use of them.

“I'm not saying I will use anything that appears. If there will be a possibility that I can be aware of, for sure. If not, I can go back to a more narrative way of telling stories because I'm interested in stories, but in my own way.”

“I think everything can be a story like everything could be a good image. The problem is how we can extract from this banality the scenes which are only apparently banal.”

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World releases digitally June 3rd.

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