Romanian director Radu Jude thinks it’s time for filmmakers to start taking TikTok seriously. During an in-conversation event at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, Jude pulled out his smartphone and showed a series of TikToks to the audience, saying, “To me, TikTok is like the beginning of cinema. It’s like Lumiére.
Filmmakers are in trouble because this is ahead of us. If you are serious about filmmaking, you have to be serious about [TikTok].” This conclusion came after IDFA ’s artistic director Orwa Nyrabia, who moderated the conversation, highlighted the connecting threads within Jude’s oeuvre.
To this, Jude said some artists are “very conscious” about their bodies of work and there are those who “make films without thinking about what connects them, and I feel I belong to this [group].” “It’s greediness. I feel very greedy because I want to make everything,” he added.
“I am preparing a film in France and am very scared but it’s a nice thing to do, not to think if the film will be good or be accepted in Berlin, Cannes...
I have this greediness to try. I want to make documentaries. I have used AI-generated images in a film about Dracula I shot last year and chose the worst ones.
Cinema to me is everything.” Jude’s conversation followed a double-bill screening of his two most recent films, “Sleep #2” and “Eight Postcards From Utopia.” The former is an impressionistic collage of live streams from Andy Warhol’s.