Film archive, 2026

The Diary of a Chambermaid

Journal d’une femme de chambre

Director Radu JUDE

1Festival entries

★Avg. rating

Mirbeau’s famous novel has been adapted for the screen countless times. Undaunted by the versions of Renoir and Buñuel before him, Jude boldly reworks the original in his own way. The film runs three strands in parallel: a migrant worker performing domestic labor, her participation - at her employer’s suggestion - in a rehearsal of Mirbeau’s play, and the family she left behind in Romania. It is both easy and difficult to pin down Jude’s intentions as he considers, ‘the starkly different conditions of France and Romania despite their shared membership in the European Union, and the blurred boundary between a perverse play and a corrupt reality.’ He clearly takes aim at the exploitation of working women, bourgeois corruption, intellectual hypocrisy, the false promises of liberalism, and the class prejudice embedded in everyday life - yet this time, Jude trades his earlier caustic attacks for a blade wielded with a quiet smile. He does not restage Chabrol’s La Cérémonie (1995). And so how one takes its unexpected ending may well depend on where the viewer is standing.

Stills4

Film details

Director: Radu JUDE
Country/Region: France, Romania
Year: 2026
Length: 94min
Original language: French
Elsewhere: Letterboxd IMDb Wikidata TMDB Douban

Director

Radu JUDE

Born in Bucharest, Romania in 1977, Radu Jude first gained recognition with his short film The Tube with a Hat (2006), which won more than 30 prizes at festivals including Sundance, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. His feature debut, The Happiest Girl in the World (2009), won the NHK/Filmmaker Award at Sundance and was invited to over 50 festivals, including Berlin and Toronto. He followed this with A Film for Friends (2011) and Everybody in Our Family (2012), which premiered at Berlin, while his shorts Shadow of a Cloud (2013) and It Can Pass Through the Wall (2014) were invited to Cannes. His third feature, Aferim! (2015), won the Silver Bear for Best Director at Berlin and was selected as Romania′s Academy Award entry. He rose to the ranks of world-class auteurs by winning the Golden Bear, Berlin′s top prize, for Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021), and the Special Jury Prize at Locarno for Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023). His most recent film, Kontinental ′25 (2025), won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at Berlin, and his latest work, The Diary of a Chambermaid, had its world premiere at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.

From Busan International Film Festival 2026, No. 31