Golden Bear Winner Radu Jude, Competing in Locarno, Readies New Found-Footage Documentary on Post-Socialist Romania (EXCLUSIVE)

variety.com:

Christopher Vourlias Berlin Golden Bear winner Radu Jude, whose latest feature, “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,” premieres Aug.

4 in competition at the Locarno Film Festival, is in post-production on his next film, Variety can reveal. “Eight Postcards From Utopia” is a found-footage documentary assembled from advertisements made during the post-socialist period in Romania.

Co-directed by Jude and the philosopher Christian Ferencz-Flatz, and edited by long-time collaborator Catalin Cristutiu, the film turns the fictional and often ludicrous medium of advertising clips into a lens on the desires, beliefs, hopes and fears of a country making the turbulent transition to democratic capitalism.

The documentary, which will be completed by the end of the year, is a continuation of a “preoccupation of mine about how images are constructed in the world,” Jude told Variety. “The use of images, the way they are made, the way they are used.” The experimental film portrays how a country newly emerged from the deprivations of the socialist economy was suddenly, jarringly introduced to contemporary consumer culture, using ads that, through a variety of styles selling a range of products, depict a coherent fantasy world of fulfilled desires. “These kinds of images offer the most fictionalized version of life, or society.