The Exit of the Trains
The Exit of the Trains, an essay film directed by Radu Jude and Adrian Cioflâncă, uses archival materials to reflect on the massacre of Jewish people in Iași, Romania, on 29 June 1941. The film consists of two parts, the first of which is composed of photographs of some of the 10,000 people who were murdered, accompanied by testimonies and excerpts from interviews and diaries. The second part of the film, which is shorter than the first, is a montage of photographs taken by German soldiers of the massacre itself.
Radu Jude (born in 1977) is a Romanian film director and screenwriter. He graduated from the Film Directing Department of the Media University of Bucharest in 2003. He has directed several short and feature-length fiction films, including The Tube with a Hat and The Happiest Girl in the World. His works have been showcased at festivals like Sundance, Berlinale, Thessaloniki, Sarajevo and London, and have received several prestigious awards, including the Hubert Bals grant, the CICAE prize at the Berlinale-Forum, the Silver Bear and the Crystal Globe. His first documentary film, The Dead Nation, came out in 2017.
Adrian Cioflâncă is a historian and the director of the Wilhelm Filderman Center for the Study of Jewish History in Romania. Since 2005, he has been a member of the Romanian Delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. He has co-edited volumes and authored papers in fields like the history of the Holocaust, history of communism, political violence, cultural history, and the theory of history. He has been a consultant on several movies and theatrical plays.