Radu Jude's The Potemkinists is now showing exclusively on MUBI starting May 25, 2023, in the series Brief Encounters.
Not many people know about the fact that, after the mutiny of 1905 depicted in Eisenstein's film, the battleship Potemkin ended up in the Romanian port of Constanța, where the sailors were granted political asylum by the local authorities. This is the starting point of the short film, which is in fact a comedy about the layers of history—or, better put, about misunderstandings coming from our relationship with history.
Something else: I made the film in one day and a half in June 2021; this is why Putin is mentioned only in a joke. One year later, I would only have one line of dialogue in the film, and that would be: Fuck you Putin and your supporters! Forever!
I offer here a few archival materials related to the arrival of the Potemkin sailors in Constanța, which I haven't used in the film:
