Of course, in notices from the Locarno Film Festival, where it premiered in August, as well as festival screenings from Busan to New York, AI proved a subject of heavy scrutiny. “I never thought, for one second, that it was going to be an important issue,” Jude casually admits in a recent discussion with TIME. “I think it's because [the Romanian] film industry, if you want to call it that, is so small that the stakes are so low, financially speaking, that nobody feels threatened, because there’s nothing to lose.”