I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians
With a penchant for dissecting compelling or disastrous episodes in Romanian history, prolific auteur Radu Jude has crafted impressive period pieces such as 2015’s Aferim! and 2016’s Scarred Hearts. Now, with his extensively titled new work, he aims to remember the past through the twisted lens of the present. Uttered back in 1941, the phrase refers to how Romanian decision makers felt when deciding to commit the Odessa massacre where thousands of Ukrainian Jews were murdered. Jude’s meta fiction sees a fearless intellectual attempting to put on a stage production about this incident and being faced with pushback from those in power who deny history at their convenience.
A scene from Radu Jude’s I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians. Image courtesy of AFI Fest.
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