AFERIM! World Cinema

Celebrated filmmaker Radu Jude returns to AFI FEST with a refreshingly crisp historical drama, delving deep into the past to produce a Romanian Western teeming with life and bursting with cynical satire. Based on historical documents and traditional folklore, Jude’s odyssey through the landscape of feudal Eastern Europe concerns an easygoing gendarme who, with his philosophical son, is sent to find a gypsy who has been accused of an affair with the wife of his nobleman master. Their journey leads them through a variety of odd encounters with townsfolk holding conflicting points of view. Jude’s characters posses absurd comic timing and vitality, urgency and humanity. The clever charm of AFERIM! rests in the way it vigorously relishes vulgarity. The result is at once hilarious and painful, brilliantly exposing dangerous prejudices that permeate to this day. This is Romania’s submission for the Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar®. —Landon Zakheim