Big World Pictures has acquired U.S. rights to Radu Jude’s “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians,” which won the Crystal Globe for best film at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival last year, and represented Romania in this year’s Academy Awards competition for foreign-language film.
The sale was handled by Beta Cinema, from which Big World has also acquired Milko Lazarov’s “Ága,” which had its debut as the closing night film at last year’s Berlinale, and has won more than 20 awards worldwide, including best film in Sarajevo, Bulgaria, Cairo, Chukotka, Fajr and Belgrade.
Jude’s film follows a young artist who is planning to reconstruct a historical event from 1941, during which the Romanian Army carried out ethnic cleansing on the Eastern Front. Big World described Jude as “one of contemporary Europe’s most distinctive creators,” adding that his pic was “an ingeniously conceived film that unfolds slowly and in detail, but hits the viewer with a singular emotional punch.”
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“Ága” centers on Nanook and Sedna, an aging Inuit couple who live in a yurt on the snow-covered fields of northern Asia, following the traditions of their ancestors. “Alone in the wilderness, they look like the last people on Earth. But their traditional way of life starts changing – slowly, inevitably,” according to Big World.
Hunting becomes more and more difficult, the animals around them die from inexplicable causes, and the ice has been melting earlier every year.
Their daughter Ága left the icy tundra long ago due to a family feud. When Sedna’s health deteriorates, Nanook decides to fulfil her wish: He embarks on a long journey to find Ága.