“I DO NOT CARE IF WE GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS BARBARIANS” (ÎMI ESTE INDIFERENT DACA ÎN ISTORIE VOM INTRA CA BARBARI) World Cinema

Mariana (Ioana Iacob) is a young, defiant artist mounting a city-commissioned theatrical production of the Odessa massacre, a horrific episode of World War II in which Romanian soldiers killed tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews. As Mariana attempts to stage a realistic reenactment of the mass murder to force her fellow Romanians to confront their sins of the past, she meets with stiff resistance from local powers-that-be. Shot with a bright, grainy simplicity that recalls Godard’s films of the late ’60s, and switching to drab video at a key moment that brings the film’s meta qualities into brilliant relief, Radu Jude’s latest masterwork is a scathing attack on Romanian Holocaust denial, a feat of historical information and a radical opus that is at once funny, uncomfortable and profound. – Beth Hanna