Radu Jude's 'Diary of a Chambermaid' Premieres at Cannes Directors' Fortnight

Radu Jude's 'Diary of a Chambermaid' (Journal d'une femme de chambre) premiered in the Directors' Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival. The film is a loose adaptation of Octave Mirbeau's 1900 novel, previously adapted by Jean Renoir (1946), Luis Buñuel (1964), and Benoît Jacquot (2015). Jude deliberately distances himself from these versions, using the novel as a starting point for an expansive, Eisensteinian montage film that explores exploitation, migration, and class hypocrisy. Set in Bordeaux, a city with a slave-trade past, the story follows Gianina, a Romanian immigrant working as a live-in maid for a bourgeois intellectual couple played by Vincent Macaigne and Mélanie Thierry. Jude contrasts the prosperity of Western Europe with the invisible labor of Eastern European emigrants. The film features a play-within-a-film where real immigrants perform an adaptation of the novel, exposing the exploitative dynamics of progressive cultural consumption. Jude employs black humor, collage, and social satire, with formal references to Chantal Akerman's 'Jeanne Dielman' and the commedia dell'arte. The cast also includes Ana Dumitrescu and Ilinca Manolache. This is Jude's first film shot in French.