Don’t Expect Too Much from the End of the World
Directed by Radu Jude
2023, Romania, 163 min, Romanian w/ English subtitles

TikTok videos, Zoom calls, corporate safety shoots, gritty black-and-white images, even footage from an old socialist film… yes, all in one film. Radu Jude, one of the most uncompromising filmmakers working today, brings these elements together in Do Not Expect… to reflect on the shittiness of living and working today. The film follows Angela over the course of a working day in Bucharest, driving through the city while producing a corporate safety video, answering calls, and managing an endless flow of tasks. It follows cloesely the rhythms of contemporary labour under neoliberalism, where exhaustion and exploitation are part of the everyday.

The film unfolds as a collage, where different kinds of images meet without hierarchy. It looks at how images are produced and put to work, how they reshape lived experience into something usable, and how they participate in the systems they seem to represent. At the same time, it proposes a way of doing cinema that remains open and porous, where no image is too minor or too degraded to matter. Jude creates a film that is formally unique, funny, messy, and sharply critical of how labor and images are entangled under late capitalism.

Before the screening, from 19:30, there will be a vegan community meal and a short introduction by Radu, initiator of dispositif film club and currently doing a PhD in the anthropology of labour. He will briefly unpack some of the references (some of them quite Romanian) and say a few words about Jude’s style to prepare you for the wild ride that this movie is. Please reserve your meal by buying a separate Community Ticket (€4) under ‘tickets’ above.