Now in its 38th year, the Showcase is bringing some of the very best of European cinema to the Washington area — from festival favorites and box-office hits to this year’s official Oscar® submissions. The full lineup includes 54 films from all 27 member states, six U.S. premieres and 12 Best International Feature Film Oscar® submissions. Romania is represented by two movies including Kontinental ’25 directed by Radu Jude which will be shown on Friday, December 12 at 7:00 pm, Monday, December 15 at 4:40 pm, and on Thursday, December 18 at 2:45 pm at AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center located at 8633 Colesville Road in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Radu Jude won the Best Screenplay award at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival for this scabrous black comedy about a guilt-wracked civil servant who attempts to clear her conscience but instead discovers 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 sort out her feelings instead. Meeting up with coworkers and old friends, she is inevitably told that there is nothing she could have done differently and that legally she is not responsible. All the while, her conversations expose the sensitive fault lines in Romanian society: foreign investment powering rapid gentrification; casual antisemitism; racist disdain for the recently arrived South Asian immigrants; and ill will between ethnic Hungarians and Romanians in this Transylvanian town that not so long ago was part of Austria-Hungary. 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 true atonement she desires. –Todd Hitchcock
Official Selection, 2025 AFI FEST and Berlin film festivals. In Romanian, Hungarian and German with English subtitles. NOT RATED. Run Time: 109 Minutes.
Tickets are $15 General Admission. Fore more information and to buy tickets, please visit
https://silver.afi.com/afi-european-showcase/
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