Now that spring has come and sprung all over the place, more of last year’s international festival movies—mostly the ones that didn’t really seek Oscar glory for the 2025 season—have started trickling into theaters. Mind you, not many theaters. So, actually watching these movies might prove a bit tricky until they’re available to rent. But I thought I’d at least put them in your mind for whenever you have the opportunity to check them out—movies that, at some point in the last year or so, lots of tired people wearing badges in some city across the sea waited in line to watch. 

The puckish, but also serious, Romanian satirist Radu Jude delivers his perhaps most straightforward film to date. But that isn’t a bad thing. Unlike his breakthrough films Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn and Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, Jude’s latest (coming hot on the heels of his A.I.-assisted Dracula) is not so interested in provocative comedy. But quite like those earlier movies, Kontinental ’25 (which won the screenplay award at last year’s Berlinale) is an alternately mordant and grave look at the social and political issues vexing present-day Romania, at once despondent and furious, sincerely heartsick in spite of all its gallows humor. 

The film follows Orsolya, an ethnic Hungarian living in Romania’s second city, Cluj, a cultured and relatively wealthy place that was once part of Hungary. Orsolya is a former law professor who now makes a sturdy middle-class living as a bailiff for the courts, overseeing the implementation of various legal orders including evictions. One such case involves a hard-done man in his 60s who was once a nationally recognized athlete, but is now squatting in a building set to be torn down to make room for a new, suspiciously funded and permitted luxury hotel. Orsolya tries to lead with compassion, offering aid to the man and urging her police escort not to mistreat him. But she is wracked with guilt when the would-be evictee kills himself instead of relocating.

This terrible incident sends Orsolya into an ethical, moral, and spiritual spiral. She is unable to focus on anything else—like, say, her horny and only half-supportive husband, or an impending family vacation to Greece—so consumed is she with immense remorse for her involvement in this man’s death. As she both chastises and attempts to console herself, Orsolya recounts the gory details of the incident over and over again, to whomever will listen.