ÎMI ESTE INDIFERENT DACĂ ÎN ISTORIE VOM INTRA CA BARBARI

It is part of the "forgotten Holocaust": the massacre perpetrated as an act of retaliation by Marshal Antonescu's troops both carried out and initiated following the Battle of Odessa in October 1941 (won by the Axis powers of Romania and Nazi Germany). Over just a few days, 25,000 Jews, perhaps twice as many, were murdered. Radu Jude had already dealt with "ordinary fascism" in Romania during the interwar period in the form of a photo-documentary essay in TARA MOARTĂ, and he now continues his process of reappraisel as a feature film experiment about a repeatedly interrupted historical re-enactment and radically examines the present: where research encounters resentment, archive material meets denial, and a brash heroine comes up against stubborn (scornful male) counterarguments. For the non-professional extras evidently still prefer to play the Nazis rather than the Bolsheviks. And the audience even goes along with the burning of the Jews. A masterpiece, as persistent as it is clever. BW