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Kontinental '25
Cluj, Transylvania. After being driven from his shelter in a house cellar, a homeless man commits suicide. Orsolya, the bailiff who carried out the eviction, is impelled to make various attempts to address her feelings of guilt. Using a mixture of drama and comedy, topics as diverse as the housing crisis, post-socialist economics, nationalism and the power of language to maintain social status are dissected with a sharp, absurdist scalpel, in a movie-literate narrative that plays partly as a homage to Rossellini’s Europa ’51 – not least in the modesty of this independent, low-budget production’s means. But while in Rossellini’s film a woman’s crisis of conscience leads to meaningful activity, here the protagonist facing the dilemma is unable to find anybody to understand her and becomes increasingly desperate for external reassurance and validation, in a manner that would be easy to condemn if Orsolya’s moral relativism were not such an uncomfortably accurate reflection of a modern-day malaise from which few of us are wholly immune.
