„Îmi este indiferent dacă în istorie vom intra ca barbari” / “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” / „Je mi jedno, že sa zapíšeme do dejín ako barbari“

fiction / 2018 / Romania, Czech Republic, France, Bulgaria, Germany / col. / 139 min.

„I do not care if we go down in history as barbarians.“ These words, spoken in the Council of Ministers of the summer of 1941, started the ethnic cleansing on the Eastern Front. The film attempts to comment on this statement. Thinking about our dark history makes one look back with the horrified gaze of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, whose “face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” (Radu Jude)