Gritty family drama unfolding on a busy urban boulevard, and in a cluttered middle-class apartment.  A black-and-white “Wallachian Western” in the rural hinterlands in the 19th century, and a colorful, soundstage-set screen version of a play set in 1981.  Documentaries based on family photographs of Holocaust victims and Communist-era provinicial militiamen, and short films featuring children, toys and lithographs.

Radu Jude has done them all and more, making him perhaps the most adventurous, exciting, and provocative auteur in recent years.  Having emerged from the so-called Romanian New Wave, Jude was among the first in the group (if there ever was one anyway) to break ranks and experiment with artifice, adaptations, and a wild variety of source material.

As the collaboration between Broadway Cinematheque and the Asian Film Awards Academy, we are very pleased to present Film Craft Workshop with Radu Jude and Avi Mograbi. Throughout their careers, Radu Jude and Avi Mograbi have been dubbed “unpatriotic” because of their insistence in steering away or even undermining the tub-thumping historical narratives in their own countries. Jude, for example, has spent the past decade decrying the petty provincialism and racism ingrained into Romanian society from the 19th century to the 21st. Mograbi, meanwhile, has been ceaseless in his criticism about the Israeli government’s state-sanctioned violence towards its own Arab population and also Palestinians in the occupied territories. Just as importantly, they have been exploring new aesthetic and ethical approaches in tackling these issues as well. What could filmmakers do to counter the nationalism and xenophobia on the rise today? An exchange of opinions between two artists separated by geography, but united in their determination in making cinema relevant again.