'I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians' Grapples With Truth, Censorship
In Barbarians, writer/director Radu Jude's ruminating, ruefully funny Romanians debate history, propaganda and truth while mounting a re-enactment of a mass murder.
History isn't always written by the victors. A few years after Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu shrugged off the slaughter of some 400,000 Jews and Roma by saying, "I do not care if we go down in history as barbarians," he was tried and executed. But seven decades later, when the film titled after his remark opens, the
