“Sometimes you find that these small videos contain more cinematic quality or anthropological documentary quality, or more artistic innovation than the whole cinema industry sometimes. For the New York Film Festival, with Andrei Rus, who’s a film scholar from Romania, we did a 35-minute film called Little Poems in Prose, which was screened there and is composed only of Romanian TikTok videos. Then we had a virtual discussion with some people in the audience. It was great because you would see that some people really respond to that and say, “Well, I never knew that someone, an amateur or a peasant from Romania, a worker, a housewife, an old granny in her countryside house, can engage with or create films.” I think the fact that it’s so new is why it might be puzzling. Because if someone says, “I heard my neighbor singing” or “I saw an old woman peasant singing,” nobody has a problem because they know about the tradition of folk arts and folk music. But in cinema, we don’t really have, until now, a folk cinema.”

I had an incredible conversation with Radu Jude on AI, TikTok and the limitations of cinema as a revolutionary medium. You can read it here.