2025 • 109 min
Kontinental 25
This movie was screened on
Synopsis
In a city in Eastern Europe transformed by real estate expansion and the continuous conversion of urban space into commodities, a civil servant responsible for carrying out evictions becomes entangled in an event that fractures the orderly surface of her existence. When a poor man, forced to leave the precarious shelter in which he was living, chooses to take his own life, what had appeared to be a simple administrative procedure turns into a moral wound that can no longer be filed away. From that moment on, the film follows the woman’s uneasy journey through a series of encounters, conversations, and confrontations that do not lead to a definitive truth, but instead open ever deeper questions about individual responsibility, guilt, and the role of institutions. Against the backdrop of a city changing its face under the pressure of profit and real estate valorisation, Kontinental '25 becomes a portrait of a society that has learned to delegate violence to impersonal procedures, to the point where it no longer recognises it as such.
Review
5 min read
Reviewed by Beatrice
· 15. June 2026
“What each of us has done or failed to do is part of political responsibility.”
(Karl Jaspers)
(Karl Jaspers)
Not only because of the poster, but also because of its title, the reference to Roberto Rossellini’s Europa ’51 is unavoidable. With Kontinental '25, Radu Jude continues his excavation of the moral contradictions of contemporary capitalism, perhaps achieving his most essential film to date. After exploring cultural vulgarity and the pornography of reality in Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, and addressing memory and social relations in works such as Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, the Romanian director here focuses on an even more elusive aspect: the dissolution of responsibility within economic and bureaucratic structures.
The event that triggers the story is simple, almost banal in its brutality. An eviction. A procedure foreseen by law. An administrative act carried out according to regulations. And yet, it is precisely from this normality that tragedy emerges. The film never seeks a culprit in the traditional sense. No character appears truly evil, no one expresses destructive intentions. The question that interests Jude is far more unsettling: what happens when violence is no longer exercised by someone, but distributed through a network of decisions, regulations, and economic interests?
Here the central theme of the work emerges: delegation.
In contemporary societies, responsibility is constantly shifted elsewhere. The owner defers to the law, the law defers to procedures, procedures defer to the officials tasked with implementing them. Everyone performs their role, and precisely for this reason no one perceives themselves as responsible for the final consequences. The suicide of the evicted man represents the sudden irruption of the real into this chain of mediations. What had remained invisible until then suddenly acquires a face, a body, a death.
The protagonist thus becomes an existential figure before she is a social one. She is not simply a woman tormented by remorse; she is someone who discovers the impossibility of fully separating her actions from the effects produced by the system to which she belongs. Her distress arises from the realisation that no procedural justification is sufficient to erase the weight of consequences.
In this sense, the film seems to interrogate one of the fundamental questions of contemporary philosophy: to what extent is it possible to declare oneself innocent within structures that generate suffering without explicitly requiring the intention to cause it?
Jude carefully avoids any consolatory answer. The protagonist’s journey does not lead to redemption. There is no spiritual transformation, no moral conversion, no cathartic resolution. On the contrary, the film suggests that consciousness alone is incapable of altering the mechanisms that produce it. Individual guilt risks even becoming a form of self-absolution: one feels bad, reflects, suffers, but the system continues to function exactly as before.
Jude’s obsession with the relationship between economy and representation runs through his recent filmography. In Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, precarious labour, corporate communication, and the media universe appeared as devices capable of absorbing and neutralising any form of critique. In Kontinental '25, this reflection shifts onto urban space. Cities become organisms that progressively expel anything that does not generate economic value. The most vulnerable human beings end up treated as residues of a transformation presented as inevitable progress.
From this perspective, the film enters into an ideal dialogue with Funny Face, an American work very different in style yet surprisingly close in its premises. There too, real estate speculation reshapes the urban fabric and turns human lives into expendable elements on the altar of economic valorisation. If Tim Sutton’s film responds through desperate, almost nihilistic rage, Jude instead chooses the path of ironic analysis and moral dissection. Both, however, observe the same phenomenon: the progressive replacement of the city as a shared space with the city as a financial object.
The strength of Kontinental '25 lies precisely in its ability to show how contemporary capitalism no longer needs to manifest itself through openly oppressive figures. Its effectiveness stems from normalisation. Its decisions appear reasonable. Its processes seem inevitable. Its victims become statistics, anomalies, collateral effects.
Jude films this universe in a tone oscillating between bitter comedy, philosophical essay, and urban chronicle. The seemingly casual conversations, the grotesque digressions, the images that brush against the absurd are not mere stylistic eccentricities. They are the reflection of a fragmented reality in which the tragic and the ridiculous coexist without hierarchy. The world continues to produce entertainment, consumption, and spectacle while, at the edge of the frame, someone disappears.
In the end, the film raises a question that goes far beyond the specific story it tells. If contemporary violence takes the form of legitimate procedures, collective decisions, and impersonal interests, where does responsibility lie today? And above all: is it still possible to identify a responsible subject, or do we now live within mechanisms that render guilt so diffuse as to become invisible?
Rather than providing an answer, Kontinental '25 turns this question into its gravitational centre. And it is precisely in this suspension, in this impossibility of resolving the knot between individual consciousness and economic structure, that the film finds its most unsettling and deeply contemporary dimension.
As Marx understood, capitalism possesses an extraordinary ability to present itself as inevitable while incessantly transforming the world it traverses. Kontinental '25 fractures precisely this appearance of necessity. Behind every procedure, behind every eviction, behind every urban redevelopment, the film reminds us that what appears natural is in fact historical; what seems inevitable has been constructed; and what has been constructed can always be imagined otherwise. Perhaps here lies the most radical core of Jude’s work: in the refusal to consider the present order as the only possible world.
“When everyone is responsible, no one is.”
(Zygmunt Bauman)
(Zygmunt Bauman)
This movie was in the official competition of Berlin International Film Festival
