Good Neighbor Policy
By Hazem Fahmy
New York Film Festival 2025:
Kontinental ’25
Dir. Radu Jude, Romania, 1-2 Special
Two years after a white vigilante murdered Jordan Neely on the subway, little has changed for New York City’s homeless population. Rendered killable for being Black and visibly distressed, Neely revealed the brutality of a system in which property is more valuable than the lives of the vulnerable, and whose ruling class would rather disappear the homeless than house them. Even in death, the state deemed Neely worthless, acquitting his murderer of all charges a year later. This case became a flashpoint for the local and national discourse on the homelessness crisis, but there is tragically little unique in the cruelty that Neely experienced. What kind of society simply copes with such regular horror? How can anyone live with the abandonment of so many of their neighbors?
Shot concurrently with his more ostentatious feature this year, Dracula, Kontinental ’25 is Radu Jude’s quiet but piercing meditation on these questions. The film follows a bailiff named Orsolya (Eszter Tompa) as she goes around the rapidly gentrifying city of Cluj desperate to find someone who will alleviate her all-consuming sense of guilt. When we first meet her, she is in the process of evicting a destitute man named Ion (Gabriel Spahiu) from the boiler room of a building set to be demolished by a German company constructing the eponymous Kontinental boutique hotel. Brilliantly, Jude does not open the film with this scene, but with roughly 20 minutes of Ion wandering the city, searching for food, recyclable plastic, and money. And so, by the time Orsolya arrives to execute the eviction notice, we do not think of Ion as symbol or trope but as a fleshed-out human being: he curses at robot dogs downtown, interrupts an open mic to ask if he can borrow money, and pisses on a trash can with a Bitcoin sticker on its side.
But to the state and the corporation that bought the building, he is nothing more than a nuisance to be removed. Surrounded by a terrifying posse of armed and masked gendarmes, Orsolya insists to the bewildered Ion that she is being as humane as possible, a statement that is as twisted as it is somewhat credible. On the one hand, Orsolya convinced the company to delay the eviction and has provided Ion with transportation to a shelter. On the other, she is depriving a man in an already horrific situation of heated housing in a country with famously deadly winters. In what world is Ion supposed to be grateful?
Of course, he isn’t. When Orsolya “kindly” grants him 20 minutes to gather what remains of his possessions, Ion smokes his final cigarette and wordlessly ties a wire around his neck to the radiator, choking himself to death. Jude quickly cuts from this grim sight to a close-up of the eviction notice, which we linger on as we hear the poor man’s final cries of pain. Meanwhile, Orsolya has coffee and pleasant conversation with the gendarmes as they wait for the 20 minutes to pass. Ironically, they too are anxious about their housing situations, asking Orsolya about the quality of life in her suburban enclave on the outskirts of the city. Upon their return to the boiler room, only she seems genuinely distressed by the sight of the lifeless man. The gendarmes quickly accept that there is nothing to be done.
Through this tragedy, Orsolya becomes the reluctant star of the story, spending the rest of the film in desperate search of absolution: from her husband, her mother, her boss, her friend, her former student, her priest—literally anyone who will listen. Though it bears much of the video-essayistic flair of Jude’s recent work, particularly in its careful use of montage to deconstruct Cluj’s cityscape, Kontinental ’25 is a chattier film, and for good reason. Like in much of his oeuvre, Orsolya’s self-involved conversations with her community reveal the barely repressed antagonisms animating Romanian society—from its refusal to reckon with its fascist past, to its unresolved ethno-territorial tensions. But with regards to homelessness, these characters also speak the universal language of a middle class at once terrified of its precarity and unwilling to shake the status quo. As grounded as the film is in the political and economic discontent of Cluj, these conversations could be happening anywhere from New York and Buenos Aires to Istanbul and Johannesburg.
When we learn that Ion used to be a star athlete, but descended into alcoholism and homelessness after an injury, Jude reminds us of the collective vulnerability of all of us who do not belong to the ruling class, affirming the axiom that most of us are closer to being homeless than being millionaires. But admitting as much risks militant class solidarity and sacrifice, an unimaginable development for Orsolya’s orbit. Instead, they all insist that she was “more than humane” and could not have possibly acted differently. She obsessively repeats: “Of course, legally I’m not at fault.” Again, in a twisted sense, both statements are true, especially because if Orsolya had not executed the eviction someone else would have. But that is precisely the folly of her own guilt, her failure to look beyond herself as an individual. She questions whether she should keep doing the job—never if the job should exist at all.
This stifling individualism is also what digs up a latent fascism in virtually all surrounding Orsolya. Her boss mockingly compares her to Oskar Schindler, crying: “If I’d only sold this pin I could have saved one more little kike!” In the lengthiest and most revealing of such conversations, her friend Dorina (Oana Mardare) shamefully confesses her wish that her own homeless neighbor would simply die so that she would no longer smell him from her window. Both women appease their guilt by donating to charities, specifically by signing up through their phone carriers to have two euros a month automatically sent to various international “tragedies,” from Ukraine to Gaza. When Dorina also mentions a charity that helps Roma people in towns around the city, she hilariously bemoans that they are not participants of either Vodafone or Orange’s (the phone duopoly in much of Europe and the Middle East) autopay charity program. Orsolya transfers her 500 euros and calls it a day.
It is also in this lengthy conversation that Kontinental ’25 registers as a sober companion piece to Jude’s Dracula. Cluj lies in Transylvania, which Romania annexed from Hungary in 1918. Orsolya belongs to the region’s Hungarian minority, the largest ethnic group in the country after Romanians, a fact that Dorina awkwardly brings up when she apologizes to Orsolya for both the historical discrimination against her people and the present online hate campaign against her. We learn earlier from Orsolya’s husband that as soon as news of Ion’s death leaked to the press, journalists and commentators seized on the fact he was ethnically Romanian to reframe a classed act of state violence into an individual hate crime on the part of Orsolya, as though her Hungarian identity is to blame. The press and online trolls thus cynically appropriate Ion’s tragedy as a rallying cry for their chauvinism, rather than a call for economic equity. Despite the flimsiness with which Dorina brings this up, she takes this moment to astutely reflect upon how rightwing Romanian discourse erases the Hungarian heritage of Cluj despite its obvious imprint on the city and region’s architecture. This observation implores the viewer to pay attention to the scattered shots across the film of classical churches and municipal buildings. The nativism which attempts to erase ethnic difference becomes clearly intertwined with the classism that erases the homeless.
But Jude is smart enough to not assume that one’s mere belonging to an ethnic minority engenders a radical political positionality. Orsolya’s conversation with her mother quickly devolves into a tirade of slurs and vitriol, as the latter blames the episode not on the brutality of the social order, but the “stupidity” of the Romanians, whom she labels “serfs,” “peasants,” and “gypsies”—a seamless blend of classist and racist imaginaries. Orsolya eventually storms off, especially after her mother begins praising Hungary’s own fascist leader, Viktor Orbán, but she too reveals a racist stream running underneath the shallow surface of her politically correct liberal talking points. When discussing Florești, the affluent suburb in which she resides, she describes new (more affordable) developments derogatorily as resembling “Chinese” housing. She speaks of the less-affluent newcomers almost as though they are invaders, which is ironic given that the globally recognizable sleek modern design of her house marks it as a new build.
Over the course of the film, Jude’s static long shots of the city gradually move away from the glamorously antique downtown to areas like Florești, contrasting the gates of exclusive communities with dilapidated shacks, abandoned cars, and unpaved roads. In between these, we see a hokey mural with the words “enjoy capitalism” drawn in the Coca-Cola font. Ironic critique or genuine celebration? This confusion is central to the characters’ inability to dream a political solution to their most immediate crises. The fact that the company building the hotel is German emphasizes how destructive the expansion of the European Union has been to poorer countries on the West’s periphery like Romania. Orsolya and those around her are so obsessively hateful of their socialist past that it clouds the horror of their present. In a particularly disturbing scene, her former student Fred (Adonis Tanta)—with whom she is about to have an affair—gleefully shows her snuff films of Russian soldiers using grenades to commit suicide to avoid maiming by drones. He cheers on this carnage beneath a garishly imposing anti-communist memorial, ignoring Orsolya’s discomfort.
For these characters, the past and the faraway become convenient displacements for their surrounding horrors. They ramble incoherently about Stalin and Putin, but they can’t seem to face their own regime—not even rhetorically. As such, responsibility, or the lack thereof, can only be an individual matter. Racists can politicize Ion’s tragedy, but the well-meaning “humane” liberals cannot, for doing so would risk unravelling the liberal order that gives them their comfortable homes. Like any good middle-class parent, Orsolya just wants a backyard and a good school for her children. There’s a world where she gets that without needing to evict Ion. But that is a world without transnational companies building boutique hotels on demolished lives. We won’t get there with charity.