Poland

About the movie:
(fictionalised documentary), script and directing with Witold Lesiewicz. A two-part film. The part made by Munk is about the work ethos again, this time the work ethos of miners. It is a story about people from the mine’s management who want to fulfil the production quota, which is at risk of not being met, and go down an old, unused mine shaft to look for coal. The film is schematic in plot but interesting as to form. (Awards: 1955 – Special Mention from the State Award Committee)Read More »

“The Dancing Hawk” refers to the son of a peasant who senses he can climb to the job in troubled times by playing his cards right. His slavery to work match his ambitions, and gradually he reaches the social position he desires. But the costs have included a dehumanized soul and a loss of a moral conscience. People have had to pay for his advancement, including those nearest to him. The downfall is equally painful: either imprisonment or the easy wasy out are offered as the alternatives.Read More »

Nightmarish and claustrophobic film from Grzegorz Królikiewicz, one of the most formally radical and innovative Polish filmmakers, yet also one of the least known. Sadly not included in the Polish boxed set of his work, the film shares a little in common with Trier’s Befrielsesbilleder and Lopushansky’s Letters From A Dead Man, along with Ryszard Czekala’s Czlowiek i chleb. Shot almost entirely in darkness with obfuscated framing, it’s difficult to capture film’s unusual beauty in still images, but the densely oppressive atmosphere is overwhelming.Read More »

Culture.pl wrote:
Marcel Łoziński’s Jak to się robi / How It’s Done is a provocative vision of the Polish model of democracy as well as being an ironic and at the same time terrifying portrait of Poland’s political stage, based on a three-year observation of an experiment conducted by the Polish political marketing guru Piotr Tymochowicz whose objective was to prove that anyone could be elevated to the summits of power. At a time when the make-up of Polish political elites leaves a lot to be desired, Łoziński’s bitter-sweet documentary shows that the ‘rule of souls’ is just a couple of neat socio-technical tricks, cynicism and political effectiveness weigh more than ideas and party colours are just a more or less colourful addition to the colour of the tie bought under the image expert’s tutelage. The product of Łoziński’s cool observation is as comic as its is horrifying.Read More »

About the movie:
In 1952 Andrzej Munk made PAMIETNIKI CHLOPOW [PEASANT DIARIES], a film that was meant, to put it briefly, to show what people were told to believe about the wonderful lives that Polish peasants led in post-war Poland. In his book ” Moja filmoteka. Kino polskie” [My Film Archive. Polish Cinema] Aleksander Jackiewicz wrote that though he found the film to lack a hint of a shadow on the picture of those times to make it truly authentic, as clearly People’s Poland could not include peasants who were not successful, even so one could find in it “a tiny bit of authenticity that was absent from the works of other directors”.Read More »

Quote:
A happily-married woman wishes she had met her second husband earlier, so that she could avoid many mistakes of the past. When suddenly moved back in time to 1980s she realizes she has one goal: find her future love.Read More »

A “Polityka” weekly journalist Marta Wesolowska and photo-reporter Erazm Ciolek visit Urszula Flis, who runs a country farm. A young woman living on her own, Flis is an untypical villager in that she is interested in culture, corresponds with writers, etc. Lozinski revisits her twenty-four years later, in 1998, in ZEBY NIE BOLALO [SO IT DOESN’T HURT]. Awards: 1975 – “Syrenka Warszawska” Award of the Polish Journalists Association’s Film Critics Club at the 5TH SHORT FILM FESTIWAL, Krakow.Read More »

A film about the construction, begun in 1948 where a village near Krakow used to be, of the city of Nowa Huta and the metallurgical plant there. A propaganda picture about the flagship construction project of People’s Poland.Read More »

Krzyżtopór Castle in Ujazd plays the lead in this short film based on an idea by Stanisław Janicki. Dziworski managed to capture the appearance and atmosphere of the castle ruins in spectacular scenes and found an interesting solution for the commentary: The photographs are accompanied by a folk ballad about the castle’s history performed by the village choir from Iwaniska.Read More »