Sovereign has acquired the U.K. and Ireland rights to Radu Jude‘s latest feature, “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,” which won the special jury prize at Locarno Film Festival.
Written and directed by Jude, the comedy stars Ilinca Manolache, Ovidiu Pîrșan, Dorina Lazăr, László Miske, Katia Pascariu and Sofia Nicolaescu, with cameos from Nina Hoss and Uwe Boll. According to its official synopsis, the film follows an overworked production assistant who is instructed to “film a workplace safety video commissioned by a multinational company. But an interviewee makes a statement which forces him to reinvent his story to suit the company’s narrative.”
“Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World” recently premiered at Locarno, where it was nominated for the Golden Leopard Award for best film and won the festival’s special jury prize. The film was well-received by critics at the fest, with PvNew‘s Jessica Kiang calling it a “dizzying, dazzling feat of social critique, an all-fronts-at-once attack on the zeitgeist, and a mischievous, often hilarious work of art about the artifice of work.”
Sovereign is planning a theatrical release of the film in the U.K. and Ireland for Q2 of 2024. The company previously released Jude’s 2021 film “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” which won the Golden Bear at Berlin Film Festival.
“I am thrilled to be collaborating with Sovereign again following our collaboration on my last film ‘Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,'” Jude said in a statement. “Their passion for original storytelling and commitment to bringing unique cinematic visions to life is truly inspiring, and I am very much looking forward to sharing ‘Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World’ with British audiences.”
He continued, “Rivette writes somewhere: ‘Cinema is fundamentally a descriptive and didactic art: the two are linked. only a hazard of history has made stories apparently consubstantial with it. Its true vocation is the essay: that is, the descriptive ordering of reality, the revelation of the relationships, connections and concordances of various phenomena.’ This is what I have tried, with my modest powers, to do in this film: to link different stories (about exploitation, about fatigue, about death, about images), different genres (road-movie, comedy, montage film, documentary film), different types of humour (from the busking to the refined) and different aesthetic strategies, which I hope the audience will discover with delight.”
Sovereign’s other credits include Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winner “Triangle of Sadness” and Ulrich Seidl’s “Rimini,” which was nominated for Berlin’s Golden Bear. Upcoming titles are Laurent Nègre’s World War II film “A Forgotten Man,” Amat Escalante’s thriller “Lost in the Night,” Viggo Mortensen-starrer “Eureka” and the drama “Small Gods” about the Batwa people of Africa’s Great Lakes region.
“We are thrilled to bring Radu Jude’s audacious masterpiece ‘Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World’ to U.K. audiences,” said Sovereign CEO Andreas Roald. “Jude’s work strikes at the heart of contemporary culture and this film challenges conventions, blurs boundaries and delivers a thought-provoking exploration of the absurdities of work and life.”
“Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World” is produced by Jude, Ada Solomon, Adrian Sitaru and 4 Proof Film, and co-produced by Adrien Chef, Claire Dornoy, Ankica Juric Tilic, Serge Lalou, Paul Thitges Distributions, Les Films d’Ici, Kinorama and Micro Film in association with Bord Cadre Films and Sovereign Films. It was made with the support of The Romanian Film Centre, Film Fund Luxembourg, Eurimages, Arte Cofinova/19 and Croatian Audiovisual Centre, and executive produced by Diana Caravia, Andreas Roald, Dan Wechsler and Jamal Zeinal Zade. Heretic is handling International sales.
