Romanian film review – Unmissable: Uppercase Print

Having just screened at the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival, one of Radu Jude’s two current films, Tipografic majuscul/Uppercase Print, was released in Romania two weeks ago. It should not be missed for the simple reason that it is a Jude film, but even more so due to its theme and approach. The director’s more recent titles are all particularly urgent in terms of content, while also being more daring and assured formally.

Starting with his drama Aferim!, a period piece set in 19th century Wallahia when Roma people were kept as slaves, and continuing with Țara moartă/The Dead Nation (2017) and Îmi este indiferent dacă în istorie vom intra ca barbari/I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018), focusing on Romania’s antisemitic past and its reluctance to address it, Jude has been the most consistently outspoken director on such thorny topics.

Uppercase Print is just as sharp and quietly devastating as the aforementioned works, although more tonally restrained. Working with excellent theatre director Gianina Cărbunariu by adapting her eponymous 2013 “documentary play”, the film tells the real story of 17-year-old Mugur Călinescu who in 1981 scribbled the walls of his native Botoșani in uppercase letters with slogans such as “We want food and freedom” or “We are sick of waiting in endless queues”. A Radio Free Europe fan, the rebellious teen was released after long interrogations by the secret state police, the feared Securitate, but eventually died in 1985 from leukemia. It was later assumed he had been irradiated by the Securitate over the years.

Călinescu’s story is told in static pieces, with the actors standing in fixed points, either facing each other or the camera, delivering their lines in a disaffected manner. The Brechtian approach defies expectations since the topic is such a dramatic one, but it also helps keep things cerebral and encourages a reflexive rather than an emotional reaction. These scenes are juxtaposed with a series of propaganda clips from the National Television archives showing the ’benefits’ of the socialist state in various areas of everyday life. As a fun bonus, the filmmakers included some particularly amusing ones such as catching honking drivers or finding inventive spaces for beating one's carpets (anyone who grew up in a social state understands the ubiquity of the first and the urgency of the latter). They are both a welcome respite from the declamatory, clinical theatre-based scenes, often acting as a (most probably unintended) comic relief, and a necessary counterpoint, showing the lies of a system that pretended to have its citizens' well-being at heart, but instead oppressed them and punished any form of resistance, as with Călinescu’s.