From the very beginning, ZFF has included in its competitions debut films by the greatest celebrity directors like Andrei Zviagintsev, Sofia Coppola, Xavier Dolan, Anon Corbijn and Steve McQueen, trying to discover new filmmakers and keep track of their future work. The section called Together Again is for the second year round featuring five titles by filmmakers whose films have already screened at previous festival editions. Among the selected titles this year is Bravo! (Aferim!) – the latest film by Romanian director Radu Jude, the two-times ZFF award winner (his first feature debut The Happiest Girl in the World earned him a special mention in 2009, and the humour drama Everybody in Our Family won the 2012 Golden Pram).
Aferim! is the current Romanian Academy Award candidate. At this year’s Berlin Film Festival Radu Jure won a Silver Bear for best director. The story is set in Romania in 1835 and follows the local policeman Costandin and his son Ionita in search of Roma Carfin, a runaway slave accused of having an affair with his master’s wife. The search becomes a real adventure; father and son meet people of different nationalities and religions, everyone biased against one another and bequeathing the prejudices for generations. When they finally find Carfin, Costandin and Ionita’s adventure still does not end.
As film critic Jurica Pavičić writes, Aferim! is a completely different film from what we are used to see in the so-called Romanian new wave. Instead of a hyper-realist drama with a floating camera, Aferim! is a kind of Carpathian western – a black and white historical fresco, a lavish and stylised film away from the iconic Mr. Lazarescu.
Switching between action scenes and surreal dialogues, Jude masterfully combines western with an analysis of the political and religion landscape of the 19th century eastern Europe, questioning in fact what went wrong in the histories of small eastern European nations. In the director’s own words: ‘When we speak about the past, we in fact speak about our (limited) notion of it.’