DISCUSSION: What good are flashlights to the blind?

Original title:

Radu Jude. 2017, Romania, 90 min

A conversation with writers Andrei Codrescu, Andrei Crăciun and Carmen Firan, moderated by Corina Șuteu

following the screening of “I Don’t Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians”
Purchase tickets for the screening & conversation

How do writers imagine, transfigure and recast reality in today’s world? Is historical memory, as Radu Jude’s film powerfully projects, an enhanced literary work? Document, literature, and film have had a close relationship since the beginning of cinema. Both mediums tell stories. How has their relationship changed in time? Film is now the world’s most powerful medium, but can it exist outside text? And vice-versa: can literature exist without film? Is historical and personal memory the common ground between text and image? And if so, how does “art” differ from “entertainment”? Films are expensive, writing less so, but are writers ostensibly freer than film-makers? Does either literature or film have some moral duty to resist propaganda? Has money and technology blurred the distinction between “art” and “propaganda”?

The three invited writers bring their experience and literary practices to the table, engaging in a whimsy but committed dialogue on these topics and their complications.

Andrei Codrescu is a poet, novelist, essayist, and documentarian. His most recent books include “The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess,” and “The Art of Forgetting.” He is an NPR commentator and a MacCurdy Distinguished Professor at LSU. Born in Transylvania, Romania, he immigrated to the U.S. in 1966 and is a winner of the Peabody Award, the Ovidius Prize, and the ACLU Freedom of Speech Award. He lives in New York.

Andrei Crăciun is a poet, novelist and journalist, based in Bucharest. His journalist accolades include best young journalist in culture (2010), columnist (2011) and reporter (2012). He published novels, short stories, poetry and essays. Andrei Crăciun is translated in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Dutch.

Carmen Firan, a poet and fiction writer, has published twenty eight books including, novels, short stories, essays and poetry in her native Romania and in the United States. Her most recent novel “The Lost Shadow” came out this year. She is a member of PEN American Center and Poetry Society of America. www.carmenfiran.com

Critics’ Corner

Cine-File: A new review of Nae Caranfil`s film (available online)

"DO NOT LEAN OUT THE WINDOW is a boisterous film that looks at the seismic shift in Romanian society with the cautious joy of a caged animal set free. It is a crucial precursor to the revelatory Romanian New Wave that should not be missed."

NY Times: Film Series to Catch in N.Y.C.

"In Romania, the democratic reforms that followed the execution of Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989 also turned the country into a global filmmaking powerhouse, culminating in what has been called the Romanian New Wave."

NYRB: J. Hoberman recommends

"These thirty films also include some of the best made anywhere during the past three decades."

MW public – Andrei Codrescu: “In Praise of New Romanian Film”

The New Wave festival returns to New York every year with astonishing new films, alongside a well-curated archive. I wouldn't miss it for the world.

J.B. Spins: “Luxury Hotel” – For fans of dystopian social satire

"Luxury Hotel could have probably only been produced during the immediate post-Ceausescu aftermath, when the palace was available, in all its faded grandeur. It is definitely spectacle, but serious, distinctively pointed spectacle."

Screenslate: “The Autobiography of N. Ceaușescu”- conceived as a flashback

"And now it is our turn, all these decades later, to be the ones to look and learn."

J.B. Spins: “The Oak” – Deeply compelling cinema

"The Oak is a defiantly bold, chaotically head-spinning indictment of Ceausescu Socialism, but it is also deeply compelling cinema. This is definitely auteurist cinema from Pintilie that still connects on a profoundly human level."

The Criterion Collection: Romanians… in America

"Film Forum will be showcasing thirty Romanian films made during the thirty years since the overthrow and execution of iron-fisted dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu."

„The Romanian New Wave shows no signs of waning, with steady input from such directors as Corneliu Porumboiu, Cristi Puiu, and Cristian Mungiu."

„The former communist country has emerged as a powerhouse of cinema over the last two decades and much has been made about the Romanian New Wave, a genre of naturalistic and unflinching films that have been consistently winning top prizes such as the Palme d’Or in Cannes and awards at the Berlin and Venice festivals.”

The New York Times

„In the last decade, the emergence of a Romanian new wave has been one of the most startling developments in world cinema, with one film after another winning prizes at Cannes and elsewhere.”

The Wall Street Journal

"Making Waves: New Romanian Cinema, the annual weeklong survey that has helped define and establish the southeastern European country as a stronghold of socially incisive, independently minded personal cinema.”

The Wall Street Journal

„Romania cinema has gradually become a central component of international film culture."