Sponsored by: Ryan Chartier and Charles Kahn
Winner: Chicago International Film Festival, Best Performance (Ilinca Manolache)
In this blistering satire of a corporate world that prizes profits over humanity, radical Romanian provocateur Radu Jude takes us on a wild ride as he follows Angela, an overworked production assistant tasked with filming the victims of a workplace accident. Stuffed with ideas, the film makes room for cameos by much-maligned film director Uwe Boll and German actress Nina Hoss, though its energy comes from the intense, hilarious lead performance by Ilinca Manolache, as both Angela and her bizarre TikTok alter ego, an epithet-spewing buffoon modeled on Andrew Tate. Sight and Sound raved, “Funny, fierce, unstoppable, Radu Jude’s latest film is quite simply essential viewing for anyone trying to survive the world as we now know it.”
And no less an arbiter of bad taste than director John Waters (Pink Flamingos) listed the film as one of his 2023 favorites, calling it “a maddeningly radical, tedious, shockingly repetitious, brilliant 2-hour-and-43-minute, Godard-meets-Harmony-Korine masterpiece…When I finished watching the movie, I was pretty sure I didn’t like it, but when I woke up the next morning, I realized I loved it. Suffer for cinema! Sometimes it’s worth it!”