SCARRED HEARTS

Romania, 1937: Emanuel (Lucian Teodor Rus), a Jewish student in his early twenties, is admitted to a sanatorium on the Black Sea coast with bone tuberculosis. Confined to bed, he nonetheless demands everything from life: he falls in love with the mysterious Yugoslav Solange (Ivana Mladenovic), courts Isa, starts drinking sessions and drives his fellow patients not to take the illness as an ending. Outside the walls of the sanatorium, meanwhile, fascism is on the march. “Scarred Hearts” (“Inimi cicatrizate”, 2016) by the Romanian Radu Jude is based on the novel by Max Blecher, who died of the same illness in 1938 at the age of 28.

Radu Jude of Romania shoots on 35mm in an almost square 4:3 format with rounded corners, like an old photograph; the camera remains static, and intertitles drawn from Blecher’s texts interrupt the scenes. The tone shifts between crushing loneliness and the coarse wit of a boarding school. In Locarno the 141-minute film won the Special Jury Prize in 2016, and four awards at the Romanian Gopo Awards. It was shown at Around the World in 14 Films in Berlin in 2016 in the Romanian Night section.

Shown at the 2016 edition of Around the World in 14 Films.

All films 2016 · Film Archive