Directed by Radu Jude • 2021 • Romania

Radu Jude is at his mischievous best in this striking short that sets out to tell the story of human life – from birth to old age – entirely through carefully constructed dioramas of childrens’ toys. Barbie dolls and plastic dinosaurs coexist with communist-era Romanian figurines in Jude’s lurid dreamworld, which finds a new visual language to skewer the racism and militarism of the modern age. And that’s before we even get to the graphic sex scenes. Only Jude could take inspiration from Flaubert’s and Chekhov’s writings – on cliché as the essence of human existence – and turn it into this kind of pop avant-garde cinema.

PLASTIC SEMIOTIC
Written and directed by Radu Jude
Cinematography by Marius Panduru
Edited by Cătălin Cristuțiu

In Romanian with English subtitles