Radu Jude, born in Bucharest, is one of the most distinctive and anarchic voices in contemporary European cinema, belonging to the second generation of Romanian Nouvelle Vague directors despite never having attended film school. His body of work—now spanning over 20 films as well as short films—is marked by constant formal reinvention, moving fluidly between political satires, documentary collages, theatrical episode films, and dark comedies, with no two films resembling each other.

Central to his work are the unresolved wounds of Romanian history: the country's involvement in the Holocaust, the violence of the Ceaușescu regime, and the hypocrisies of post-totalitarian society. His black-and-white film Aferim! (2015), a Western-style portrait of Roma persecution in nineteenth-century Romania, earned him the Silver Bear at the Berlinale.

He followed this with Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, a comedy of enlightened rage skewering post-communist hypocrisy, which won the Berlinale's Golden Bear in 2021—cementing his place as one of the most important and entertaining filmmakers working today.

His most recent films include Don't Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023), Dracula (2025), and Kontinental '25 (2025 Silver Bear Winner).

In 2023, Radu Jude made Sleep #2 during his residency in Berlin as a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellow.

Radu Jude’s one-hour desktop film Sleep #2 consists of live-streaming webcam footage of Andy Warhol’s grave in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, recorded day and night, across shifting light and climate throughout the course of a year.

Paying tribute to Andy Warhol’s landmark film Sleep (1963), which captured Warhol’s lover John Giorno slumbering for more than five hours, Sleep #2 is both an homage and a voyeuristic study of death, immortality, and posthumous celebrity.

Rather than a silent, dead object, the gravestone becomes a living, mesmerizing site—visited by devoted pilgrims who leave flowers, flags, and Campbell's soup cans, a wandering family of deer, and self-aware fans who pose for photos and wave at the camera. On one occasion, a visitor briefly bares his bottom to the lens—less an act of subversion than a knowing wink at Warhol's own film Taylor Mead's Ass (1964).

Premiered at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival and now shown at CCA Berlin for two weeks, Sleep #2 offers captivating glimpses into fame’s afterlife, mediated through found footage—a ubiquitous genre in which authorship and dramatic closure dissolve into an endless stream of images, untethered from narrative or time.