Ultra-contemporary and entirely unique, Radu Jude’s anarchic film takes aim at late capitalism and internet culture with a mischievous swipe. As a dogged gig worker with an outrageous alter-ego, actor and content creator Ilinca Manolache gives a powerhouse performance in this award-winning satire.

Taking the film-festival world by storm upon its release, Radu Jude’s outstanding debut short roams through the muddy roads of rural Romania. Tender in parts yet never straying into sentimentalism, this snapshot of a father-son bond inhabits the realities of poverty with a matter-of-fact clarity.

As sharp as a knife’s blade, Radu Jude’s short visually quotes Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet classic Battleship Potemkin to dissect the paradoxes of the present. Holding no punches, darkly comic musings on cinema and memory expose the sheer absurdity of artmaking under bureaucratic authorities.

If you ever wondered what a Radu Jude-directed Barbie would look like, here’s a taste. Staging colorful toys in comic and grotesque positions, this stop-motion short lampoons the sad cycle of human life, filled with sex, consumerism, and war. In such an existence, death seems to be a sweet release.

Aiming his satirical arrow at the contradictions of religion, Radu Jude brings thorny questions of faith down to earth in this darkly ironic short. From tax forms and rush-hour traffic to customer’s woes, the daily travails of an ordinary priest are rendered amusingly, farcically transactional.