Romanian film review – Politics, Genre, Classics, Surprises: Berlinale 2025 & Visuali Italiane

The 2025 edition of the year’s first major film fest in Europe (and one of the biggest worldwide), the Berlin International Film Festival, took place between 13 and 23 February. My notes come with a bit of delay, as I was also hit by the festival flu that got so many of us sniffling and coughing our way through the cinemas, but coincidentally at a good time to introduce a current fest in Romania.

The Berlinale official competition featured once again a film by Radu Jude, Kontinental ’25, and he snatched an award again, this time for best screenplay. A well-deserved prize, even if the always (and entertainingly) self-deprecating Jude called himself “a bad screenwriter” when accepting the trophy, especially in a competition with few memorable films. Among them the big winner, wonderful, funny, wise, terrifically eloquent coming-of-age story Dreams (Sex Love), directed by Dag Johan Haugerud. But back to Kontinental ’25, which is more consistent in form, rhythm, and style than some of the director's previous films, also calmer and more melancholic, but just as sharp, and riotously funny. The film was shot on an iPhone on location in Cluj-Napoca and tells the story of a bailiff who falls into a an acute existential crisis when one of the men she has to evict dies. Gentrification, social inequity, capitalism, morality, ethics, religion, multiculturalism: Jude tackles them all with his usual wit and critical words. I will write more on the film when it premieres in Romania. I suspect and hope it will make quite a splash.

Run by a new artistic director and with new members on the selection team, I was happy to see more genre titles take over the festival’s competition (Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s Reflections in a Dead Diamond was wild) and the surprises in the new section called Perspectives, dedicated to fiction debuts. Valentine Cadic’s lovely and very French That Summer in Paris featured a protagonist who tries to make the best out of her Parisian holiday after having been denied entrance to the Olympics, catching up with her stepsister (an excellent India Hair) and her daughter, meeting new people, and generally taking in the city. Deceptively light, the film unfolds as a thoughtful, constantly surprising portrait of a young woman at a vulnerable time but self-assured enough to know what she wants, carried by great curiosity and gentleness. Delightful. Ira Sachs’ Peter Hujar’s Day, playing in Panorama, also took me by surprise, not because I was not expecting to enjoy it – Sachs is such an intelligent, sensitive filmmaker – but because I did not expect to be so moved, so enthralled by a conversation piece in which the photographer of the title recalls a pretty random day in 1970s New York. The Retrospective section focuses on classics, and this time it spotlit German genre cinema of the 1970s. A revelatory, fun selection, and the best collective atmosphere in a theatre. Not to make it too confusing, but there is a separate section called Classics, i.e. restored or rediscovered films. Antonio Giménez-Rico’s