Heretic Buys World Rights to Latest From Golden Bear Winner Radu Jude – Variety
Courtesy of Heretic
Athens-based company Heretic has acquired the worldwide distribution rights to Don’t Expect Too Much from the End of the World, the latest film from Berlinale Golden Bear winner Radu Jude (‘Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn’), which will be screened on the serves on the international jury of this year’s Berlin Film Festival.
Split into two parts, Jadu’s latest film follows an overworked and underpaid production assistant who has to drive around the city of Bucharest to film the casting for a workplace safety video commissioned by a multinational company. In the second half of the film, one of her interviewees makes a statement that creates a scandal, forcing him to reinvent his story to fit the company’s narrative.
Borrowing a phrase from Polish aphorist and poet Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, Don’t Expect Too Much from the End of the World is “part comedy, part road movie, part montage” and explores various aspects of labor, exploitation, death and the new gig Economy, according to Jude.
“At the same time it is a film that deals with the difficult problem of image production. All of this is on the surface, as they say – but the film only has this one level, it’s a film of surfaces, a film without depth,” he said. “And it’s a film that’s even more amateurish in its structure and staging than my last few films.”
Don’t Expect Too Much from the End of the World is produced by microFilm’s Ada Solomon and 4 Proof Film’s Adrian Sitaru and co-produced by Paul Thiltges Distributions, Les Films D’ici, Kinorama and microFILM.
“Following the ride that was ‘Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn,’ we were thrilled to take on Radu’s next project, which once again pushes the camera to meticulously record, annotate and reveal our current reality,” said Ioanna Stais, Head of Heretic Sales and Acquisitions.
“It is very exciting to see films that so uncompromisingly touch on the issues of the day with the means of the times and we are delighted to bring another of Radu’s innovative cinematic works to an international audience.”
Heretic’s EFM listing includes Palestinian filmmaker Muayad Alayan’s “A House in Jerusalem,” which recently had its world premiere at the Rotterdam Intl. film festival; the Sundance Award-winning documentary And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine, directed by Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck; Yorgos Goussis’ “Magnetic Fields”, Greece’s official selection for this year’s international feature film Oscar race; Valentina Maurel’s debut I Have Electric Dreams, which won three awards at the Locarno Film Festival and the Grand Prize in the Horizontes Latinos section of the San Sebastian Film Festival; and Marian Mathias’ “Runner,” which premiered in Toronto and won the Jury Prize in San Sebastian.