Aferim! (2015)
★ — Aferim! (2015)
Aferim! arrived in 2015 as one of the more talked-about films to emerge from the Romanian New Wave, a loose movement that had been drawing international attention since the mid-2000s. Directed by Radu Jude, the film is set in early nineteenth-century Wallachia and follows a constable named Costandin, hired by a boyar to track down a Roma slave who has fled his estate. The subject matter places the film squarely in the largely unexamined history of Roma slavery in the Romanian principalities, an institution that remained legal well into the 1850s and one that receives remarkably little attention in mainstream European historical cinema. Shot in black and white in an Academy ratio, the film has the feel of an old woodcut print brought to life, dusty roads and bare winter trees standing in for a world that has been scrubbed from polite memory. It picked up the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival, and was Romania's submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, which gives some sense of how seriously it was received on the festival circuit.
Jude had been building a steady if quiet reputation in Romanian cinema before this project, working on shorter films and features that dealt with uncomfortable corners of his country's past and present. Aferim! was produced across three countries, with Hi Film Productions, Klas Film and Endorfilm sharing the work between Romania, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic. That kind of co-production arrangement is common in Eastern European cinema, where budgets are modest and international partnerships help films reach wider audiences. The Bulgarian involvement is worth noting for anyone who follows the region's output closely (and if you do, there are a few other Bulgarian productions on this site worth your time, including Zift and Megdan: Between Water and Fire). The screenplay draws on period sources, folk songs and historical documents to reconstruct the texture of Wallachian society, and Jude has spoken in interviews about wanting the dialogue to feel rooted in the language and attitudes of the era.
The principal cast is drawn largely from Romanian theatre and television. Teodor Corban, who plays the constable Costandin, is a familiar face in Romanian drama, a reliable screen presence who carries much of the film's considerable runtime on his shoulders. His son in the film is played by Mihai Comanoiu, and the two share most of their scenes on horseback, their exchanges forming the bulk of the script's dialogue. Toma Cuzin takes the role of the runaway slave Carfin, the figure around whom the entire pursuit is organised, while Luminița Gheorghiu, one of the most respected actresses in contemporary Romanian cinema, appears in a supporting role. Alexandru Dabija rounds out the named cast. The performances across the board are polished but unremarkable, committed to the material without any single turn that lifts the film into something more than the sum of its parts. For those who like to track how this kind of morally weighted historical drama lands alongside similar fare, it is worth comparing the approach here to what was attempted in Mustang, another 2015 drama from the region that drew its share of critical praise, or the very different register of Apocalypto, which also placed a pursuit at the centre of a brutal historical world.
A-Z World Movie Tour Romania I can’t give Aferim! more than 1 star because, honestly, it was deeply uncomfortable to watch, and not in the way it probably intended. Yes, it’s set in 19th century Wallachia, a time when Roma slavery was legal, and yes, it’s trying to be a stark period piece showing the brutality of that world. But the film spends nearly every minute drenched in relentless racist slurs, dehumanising jokes, and sexist taunts, all aimed at the Roma character, Carfin. It doesn’t feel like critique, it feels like complicity. The camera lingers, the jokes pile up, and the lead constable, our so-called protagonist, spouts bigotry like it’s punchline after punchline. No empathy. No humanity. Not even trying to hide it. I have Roma ancestry, and I know full well the long history of oppression we’ve faced, then and now. So I didn’t need a “realistic” film to tell me that people were cruel. What I did hope for was some depth, some perspective, some moral clarity. Instead, it’s presented with a cold, almost clinical detachment that makes the cruelty feel casual, routine, even normal. It’s not challenging the racism, it’s performing it, over and over, like it’s brave just for showing it existed. Maybe the filmmakers thought they were holding up a mirror. But mirrors can also be used to stare without seeing. This isn’t bold cinema, it’s exhausting, one-note, and ultimately exploitative. It offers no insight, no redemption, no voice to the oppressed. Just 108 minutes of degradation dressed up as art. I walked away feeling worse, not wiser.
I should say that my Roma heritage is not something I raise lightly in a film review, and I want to be clear that it is not the only reason this film left me cold. It is possible to make unflinching cinema about racism and oppression without giving the audience a reason to feel complicit, and plenty of films have managed exactly that. What bothers me most about Aferim! is the gap between its apparent ambitions and what it actually puts on screen for over an hour and three quarters. Discomfort, on its own, is not the same as insight. A film can leave you feeling rotten and still have earned that feeling, but this one, for me, never does the work to justify the weight it asks you to carry. Sometimes the bravest thing a filmmaker can do is show you what something meant, not just that it happened. This one only manages the latter.
Rating: ★ | Year: 2015 | Watched: 2025-08-26
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Aferim! (2015) on YouTube
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