Uppercase Print(RJ Retro)
Radu Jude has long professed his interest in appropriating existing texts and images for his work. With Uppercase Print, he has upped his ante by adapting a play based entirely on the secret police files of the hunt, interrogation and persecution of a teenager who sprayed protest graffiti on buildings in a small Romanian city in 1981. While reconstructing award-winning playwright Gianina Carbunariu’s stage production to a tee – with the cast delivering their lines in static shots on imaginatively-designed sound stages – Jude mixes things up by interspersing these performances with footage drawn from snippets of Romanian state television of the day. With this juxtaposition of the real (wire-tapped conversations between the ostracized schoolboy and his suffering mother, testimonies of teachers and schoolboys turning into snitches) and the fictional (newsreels, cooking shows and pop-music programmes propping up propaganda about a prosperous Romania), Uppercase Print is a devastating document about the way an authoritarian regime consolidates its power by bombarding its people with both violence and visual imagery.
Director
Radu Jude
Cast
Şerban Lazarovici, Bogdan Zamfir, Ioana Iacob, Şerban Pavlu
Release Date
25-12-2021
Language
Romanian
Run Time
128 minutes
