After releasing not one but two feature films last year that had him competing for both a Golden Bear in Berlin and a Golden Leopard in Locarno, prolific Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude would have been forgiven for taking a breather in 2026. Instead, the tireless and tirelessly inventive director managed to one-up himself, not only making his French-language debut but his first appearance at the Cannes Film Festival, where his latest, “Diary of a Chambermaid,” premiered in Directors’ Fortnight.
At this point in his staggeringly productive career, Jude could likely pad out an impressive festival sidebar on his own. Romanian devotees of their puckish homegrown hero will have to settle for a double bill instead, with both “Chambermaid” and last year’s vulgar vampire romp “Dracula” playing out of competition at the Transilvania Film Festival, which takes place June 12 – 21.
Described in a title card as a “variation on the novel,” Jude’s film is loosely based on the eponymous book by French author Octave Mirbeau about a chambermaid in 19th-century France who is ruthlessly exploited by a series of employers, gradually losing her innocence until she becomes as corrupt and depraved as them. A scabrous satire of Parisian society that was scandalous in its time, “Diary of a Chambermaid” was previously adapted for the screen by Jean Renoir and Luis Buñuel, and more recently by Benoît Jacquot.
Transposing the book onto a contemporary setting, Jude’s take centers on an impoverished Romanian migrant, Gianina, played by a sensational Ana Dumitrașcu, who finds work as a housekeeper and au pair for a smugly bourgeois-bohemian couple living in Bordeaux. When not passive-aggressively bossing Gianina around — or leaving her at the mercy of their bratty son, Louen (Louen Bouteiller) — Pierre (Vincent Macaigne) and Marguerite (Mélanie Thierry) dispense the requisite liberal pieties about the state of the world (and, of course, the plight of Romania), though their concerns go only so far when Gianina’s needs run counter to their own.
For her part, Gianina is just trying to stow away enough earnings to support her daughter, Maria (Sofia Dragoman), who lives with her grandmother (Liliana Ghita) in a grimly anonymous village in the countryside, and to save for an anticipated Christmas reunion in Romania. The gulf between their two worlds is wide, and Jude straddles it with wide-ranging intellect and his characteristic impish wit, while also telling a surprisingly heartfelt story about the lengths to which a mother will go for love.
Jude spoke to Variety ahead of this year’s Transilvania Film Festival about why “Diary of a Chambermaid” is as relevant as ever in today’s Europe, how critics try to pigeonhole him as a “vulgar filmmaker,” and why he can’t stop making movies — even in spite of himself.
You call this film a “variation on the novel” written by Octave Mirbeau. What sort of relationship do you have with that text?
I called it a “variation.” It’s not maybe the exact word, but I didn’t have an exact word for my approach. Although the book did provide an inspiration in itself, it worked more like a springboard to help me push my story forward. It’s a very imperfect book. It’s quite a messy book. But I think it’s so wild, it has so many wild episodes, and it has so many wild things in it. That’s why I think the Surrealists loved it.
The moment that I reread it, I realized that I didn’t want to adapt the book at all, but I thought it would be interesting if I placed my story somehow next to parts of it. I can even theorize it as another kind of adaptation — adaptation as montage, where I don’t adapt the book, but I take episodes from the book and I transform them. We know from Eisenstein that when you put together two images or two sets of images, something new appears. What is new that appears here, I don’t know.
And how did you bring the story into a contemporary setting?
I think this film was composed around a perspective about daily problems of migration, or what’s between the one who stayed and the one who left. Somehow, I think it’s quite interesting to see this difference of perspective. And for us here, it’s crucial. I think 25% of the [Romanian] population emigrated for economic reasons. Ten years ago, I think it was the second largest migration inside Europe, after Syria. I wanted the tone of the film to be lighter, but there’s some sadness left outside of the frame.
I think we are in a time or in a Europe of contradictions, where you can have, on the surface, the same European Union, but it’s not a real solidarity, a real equality. When I touch this topic, I hesitate, like I hesitated for “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,” and also for “Kontinental ’25,” because this critique about inequality, and the relationship with the EU and with Europe, is being hijacked by the fascists. So I really hesitated for a while if I should do this kind of story. But I consider myself a pro-European, and it’s exactly we who believe in this European project [who have] to touch the sensitive issues around it. It’s for us to do it, and not to leave these things to the fascists.
For all the social comedy you get out of poking fun at the French intellectuals in your film, you’re also probably holding up a mirror to many of the members of your audience.
If there’s a critique there, it’s not meant to attack individuals, because all of us are in a kind of flow with everything around us. Someone told me in an interview, “I think these people are horrible.” But I don’t think these people are horrible at all. I think they’re just getting on with their lives. You cannot change the structures, the functioning of our world today. You have to adjust to that, and everybody does that, more or less.
What is funny is that, in the last five years or more, Romania is a country of immigration as well. There’s a lot of people from Sri Lanka, from Bangladesh, from India, from Nepal, working in Romania, because Romanians are working in the West. Now you hear more and more stories about the mistreatment of workers from these countries by Romanians — exactly by the people who used to complain about how the West is treating us. I think it’s completely ludicrous and sad at the same time. If the structure is set in this way, then everything goes with that flow.
I thought there was something in the mother-daughter bond between Gianina and Maria that you haven’t explored in quite the same way before. The emotional stakes felt different from your other movies.
As a filmmaker, I don’t have a manner or a style — not even an inventory of themes. Some of my last few films can be considered somehow provocative. Before that, I made seven feature films and long-format documentaries about the dark parts of Romanian history. So for a while, I was considered a filmmaker of history. I never consider myself anything. I found out pretty early that I cannot find my own manner. You see a shot of Éric Rohmer, you recognize it. You see a scene of Haneke, you recognize it. I don’t have that. And for a while, I felt bad. I thought any good filmmaker, any good artist, finds a style. But if you look more, you discover that there are other models. Godard is a model that his films are so diverse, if you take the first film and the last, they don’t have anything in common.
On the contrary, I feel a kind of freedom to explore in any direction, and I don’t have obligations — not even towards my own style. Yes, [“Chambermaid”] is a more sensitive perspective on some of the themes, but I don’t see any contradiction at all. People, even film critics, consider that you are the one who did the last film. They say, “This is the vulgar filmmaker who made ‘Dracula.’” But before that I made “Kontinental ’25,” which is not a vulgar film. Somehow, you are pigeonholed into the last work you made. Everyone expects that from now on, I only do vulgar deconstructions of myths, which is not my intention. [“Dracula”] was just a one-off.
Maybe that’s one of the positives of making so many movies. We don’t have time to judge you on the last one, because you have another film already coming out and challenging us in different ways.
It’s true. And that’s the lesson of Fassbender, I guess. Godard has this idea, he says Fassbender died of an overdose of creative obligations toward Germany. [Laughs.] The idea of having creative obligations towards something opens better ways [of making movies] than the desire or the pleasure of doing it. That’s the problem when you’re a self-employed filmmaker: Sometimes you don’t know what to do. So I consider myself having obligations towards Romania, towards Romanian cinema, towards the history of cinema. I just try to fulfill my obligations in a way.
You won’t be able to attend the Romanian premiere of “Diary of a Chambermaid” because you’re about to begin production on another film, “Love Diptych.” Can you tell us about it?
It’s an answer to another Rossellini film, called “L’amore,” which has two parts: one about a love affair, and another, a religious story. I want to do the same. It’s a diptych. The first part is the story of a love affair involving a cam girl. Oana Maria Zaharia, the performer and co-writer of the film, also starred in “Dracula.” While making “Dracula,” we spoke about her experiences in this industry, so I said, “Well, let’s make a movie. You write your own stories starting from your own interactions, and we compose a film.”
That’s the first half. And the other half is a story about missionaries in Romania after the revolution. The Christian religion was only tolerated in the communist dictatorship, and other religious sects were forbidden. After the revolution, there was an explosion of missionaries from all sects to preach their version. Some of these interactions were documented, and I rely on a real story of one of these cases. So it’s a story about human love and love for God.
You’re one of the most prolific filmmakers working today. What drives you to keep making movies?
I remember when I was young, and working as an assistant director, working for long hours for so many years — feature films, commercials, TV, whatever — I always said, “Well, I will never make it as a filmmaker. Nobody will give me one euro to make something.” So now, when I can — with my small powers — grab a little bit of money to make a film, it’s so exhilarating. Although it’s tiring and sometimes frustrating, I find a certain strength in that.
I really think that Romania is such an interesting place today, where you have so many things happening in a country which is in Europe, but also somehow on the periphery of Europe. With a troubled recent history, with all the fascist dictatorships and communism and chaos after 1990. With everything happening here — compared to other Western countries, at least — it’s terrible for our lives. But some things are so wild and unexpected on the level of everyday life that it’s so interesting from the point of view of narrative and dramaturgy. I feel a need to touch these topics more and more. It’s such a rich and dynamic society. I feel that Romania offers filmmakers some kind of reality that needs to be used in order to tell stories.
The Transilvania Intl. Film Festival runs June 12 – 21.