Memories from the Eastern Front
Synopsys
A film by Radu Jude and Adrian Cioflâncă:
A cinematic analysis of a photo album made by a Romanian Army unit in WW2.
How would a photo album carefully made by a Romanian Army Regiment from WW2 look like? By a stroke of luck, we have an answer: Regiment 6 Roșiori created their photo album on the Eastern Front. So now we can see how a “military gaze” operates, what does it see, what does it want to keep in memory for all posterity. We have systematically broken the flow of this silent photo album with texts taken from other documents – which reveal what the photos tried to hide.
Radu Jude is a Romanian director and screenwriter. In 2006, he made the short film The Tube with a Hat, winner of more than 50 international awards. Jude’s feature debut The Happiest Girl in the World (2009) was selected for more than 50 international film festivals. Titles such as Aferim!, Scarred Hearts and Everybody in Our Family followed and won multiple awards. The international premiere of The Dead Nation in Locarno 2017 marked his debut in documentary film. “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” (2018) won the Crystal Globe for Best Film and Label Europa Cinema Prize in Karlovy Vary in 2018.
Uppercase Print and The Exit of the Trains (co-directed with Adrian Cioflâncă), premiered in Berlinale Forum 2020.
His latest feature, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, won the Golden Bear in Berlinale 2021.
In the summer of 2021, Radu Jude was present in Locarno IFF – Corti d’Autore with the short Caricaturana and in Venice IFF – Out of Competition with the short film Semiotic Plastic.
In 2022, Jude returned to Berlinale with a short documentary co-directed with Cioflâncă: Memories from the Eastern Front.
His latest short, The Potemkinists world premieres in Quinzaine des Realisateurs 2022.
Adrian Cioflâncă is a historian. He is director of the „Wilhelm Filderman” Center for the Study of Jewish History in Romania and a member of the Collegium of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives. He was a member of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania (2003-2004) and expert in The Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania (2006), co-author of the Final Reports of the two commissions.
Since 2005, he is a member of the Romanian Delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Tziporah Wiesel Fellow of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington (2009). He edited, in collaboration, eight volumes; the last one: Discourse and Antisemitic Violence in Modern Romania, Hasefer, București, 2020. He authored studies in fields like the history of the Holocaust, history of communism, political violence, cultural history, the theory of history. Consultant for several movies and theatrical plays. Co-director with Radu Jude of the documentary The Exit of the Trains (world premiere at Berlinale, in 2020).
