KONTINENTAL ’25 Luminaries

Radu Jude won the Best Screenplay award at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival for this scabrous black comedy about a guilt-wracked civil servant’s effort to clear her conscience, instead discovering that guilt is only a relative concept in contemporary Romania. Distraught over an unexpected, fatal tragedy during her work as a court bailiff in the city of Cluj, Orsolya (Eszter Tompa) is thrown into a tailspin, backing out of a planned family vacation to Greece with her husband and kids to instead sort out her feelings. Meeting up with coworkers and old friends, she’s inevitably told that there’s nothing she could have done differently, and besides, legally, she’s not responsible. All the while, her conversations expose the sensitive fault lines in Romanian society: foreign investment powering rapid gentrification; casual antisemitism; ill will between ethnic Hungarians and Romanians in this Transylvanian town that not so long ago was part of Austria-Hungary; and racist disdain for the recently arrived South Asian immigrants. Orsolya meets up with a former student from her days as a law professor, with whom she spends a night of drinking, debating and eventually, wild sex. She later visits with a priest who, like others, absolves her for her shortcomings — but more as an act of letting go than the atonement she desires. –Todd Hitchcock