Elitist and for the commonwealth - Eight Postcards from Utopia

Ioana Satmari • 3/21/2025

Here’s the recipe: a director’s vision and a philosopher’s insight, tossed onto a poisoned social sublayer, left to simmer until consumerism rises to the surface. Directed and crafted by Radu Jude and Christian Ferencz-Flatz, Eight Postcards from Utopia has etched a small, yet grand, history of how we portray ourselves. Or how we are (mis)represented.

The film speaks of the One. The Wealthy One. The Lucky One. The Satisfied One. Healthy. Future-oriented. Beautiful. Unbeatable. In step with the times. Dressed in immaculate clothes (washed with…). Young. Technologically adapted. The One who knows how to have fun. The One who has the money to have fun. The One who slips through the cracks of consequence. The One who seizes opportunities. The One who benefits. The One, someone, another.

Eight Postcards from Utopia invites you to find your avatar. Which version do you wish to become? Or who have you become without realizing it? It’s as if we were gazing retrospectively at the effects of The Substance. The Substance composed of the deprivations of communism, the avalanche of seemingly abundant opportunities of the ‘90s, social imbalance, and the relentless promotion of a singular, universal truth. Could this be considered a collective documentary? How much of it is storytelling, and how much of it is absurdity, spinning a narrative from mere advertisements? How much is the mind of the creators, and how much is your own, piecing together the final image? Surely, if we all lent our minds to it, entirely different stories would emerge.

Starting from History of the Romanians, we are the pure Dacians, for whom everything was about masculinity, courage, and strength. This nationalism, nourished by a desire to be more connected, to form a community, ends up dividing us further. Much like today’s reality: every political faction blaming the other, pointing fingers at one another and at so-called leaders with inflated egos. The values reflected in these commercials are like tiny cavities we fail to notice in time. And when we do, it’s already too late. We are different from one another. Some see others’ cavities but fail to notice their own, some see none at all, and some simply stop caring as our teeth fall out. The power of analogy, the combination of images, the newly crafted image, carried by enviable Ones or by a coveted status, has turned humanity into puppets.

Money talks louder and louder. And more and more, we talk through money. We are efficient, and anything that doesn’t provide satisfaction or compensation isn’t worth it. This issue: money talking too much through us, yet too little, about financing disruption, shapes the History of the Romanians. In a country that has become profoundly impoverished, the poor now want to appear rich. All energy is channeled into displaying a powerful ability to purchase kitsch.

The response and social disparity, correlated with and later represented by The Technological Revolution, further amplify rejection. But this rejection is not merely external, it’s internal, too. We now possess a new and idealized version of appearances, and everything on our bucket lists revolves around feeding an image.

The Magique Mirage of this documentary dissects our evolution as a society since we “freed ourselves” and embarked on our political journey to fulfill certain social ideals and achieve some form of stabilization, whatever that may mean. Even if, at first glance, it seems unrelated to political influence, over time, one has followed the other. Either politics exploited the situation, or politics simply mirrored it. Advertisements are a pure way to diagnose a society. They speak to The Ages of Man. But like animated films, with their superficial layers and deeper references, so too do The Ages of Man shape our perception of visual messages. The images created by this collection of commercials form a perception of what we seek. Of what matters to us. And even an image of who we are. Out of context, we see someone greedy for material things—immediate, cheap, advantageous—and greedy for status. Within context, that someone becomes part of a herd, disappearing into the vast sea of idealistic belonging.

This combination of images creates genuine poetry. Found Poetry. Poetry with street’s words. All these images can be connected and related in countless ways to The Anatomy of Consumption. This is the philosophical approach to building a human puzzle with brutal truths. Advertisements feed a need, sometimes even provoke it. But if we weren’t the right audience, the bite effect wouldn’t exist. The ad wouldn’t sink its teeth into us..

With sharply targeted genres, advertisements from the ‘90s through the 2010s enforce a strong segregation of roles: Masculine Feminine. The woman tends to the cauldron and the laundry, with clothes arriving almost brown and, Poof!, they’re immaculately white. The man handles the finances, knowing exactly what needs to be done. Translation: the woman manages the material image, while the man funds it. As long as everyone does their job, it doesn’t matter: you do not confound me, we move on our separate life paths. This created, beyond differences in ideals and values, a gap in power. Advertisements have shaped, or perhaps merely reflected, how we relate to one another based on gender. And we still do…

Eight Postcards from Utopia is not a good advertisement for our future. It talks about The Ones and The Zeros. It speaks in ones and zeros, like there’s nothing in between. But this is who we are, why hide it?