Eight Postcards from Utopia + The Exit of the Trains

Eight Postcards from Utopia is a found-footage documentary assembled exclusively out of post-socialist Romanian advertisements. Drawing from the debris of Romania's long transition period, the film speaks about love and death, the human body and its frailty, the natural and the supernatural and of course, socialism and capitalism. Bouncing between found poetry and an outdated encyclopedia, between trash art and Summa theologiae, EIGHT POSTCARDS sees Radu Jude teaming up with philosopher Christian Ferencz-Flatz to make another hilarious and unforgiving take down of meta capitalist mythology.

The Exit of the Trains is a documentary essay composed entirely of archival photographs and documents of the first big massacre of the Jews in Romania: In the city of Iași, on the 29th of June 1941, more than 10,000 Jews were killed--first by bullets, than by asphyxiation in freight trains.

The film, which is an attempt to use the montage of archive materials in order to offer a deep and special view of history, has two parts:

The first part of the film could be titled "the encyclopedia of the dead": photographs of the people who were eventually killed by the Romanian army and by civilians are accompanied by voices who recite the documents related to their fate in the massacre: witness accounts, testimonies from the post-war trials, interviews with survivors, private diaries etc.

The second part--shorter--represents a montage of the remaining photographs of the actual massacre (taken mostly by the German soldiers who were in town).