Poland

Each day of the week is represented by a ballerina beginning with a young child and ending with an older ballet teacher. (IMDb)Read More »

In Talking Heads, Kieślowski interviews 40 different people ranging from a one-year-old to a one-hundred-year-old simply asking them three questions: “What year were you born?”, “Who are you?” and “What would you like?”Read More »

review from imdb:

Semi-biography of the young Kieslowski, 21 July 2006
8/10
Author: ntimdb from Hong Kong

This is the most overtly biographic film amongst the works of the great Krzysztof Kieslowski, since Kieslowski was a very private and reserved person as I perceived him.

In “Personel”, Romek Januchta was his alter-ego, bot just bore great resemblance to the director especially when he wore glasses(to see more clearly, when he was not a new-comer anymore), he worked in the theatre in the wardrobe department just as Kieslowski did. This film is rare chance to have a glimpse of the first half of Kielslowski’s life other than it was told in books and interviews.Read More »

Marta, a 30-year-old doctor, loses control over her life. She pushes away her loving husband. One day she meets by chance Artur, a young criminal, who falls deeply in love with her. Accidental sex, unwanted pregnacy. Marta wants to get rid of it but Arthur, with his mothers help, wants to save it. Alicja, Marta’s sister, tries to help Marta in this harsh life situation, even thought her own life is in mess. The secrets, masks, and hidden obsessions are about to blow openRead More »

Ryszard Bugajski’s Przesluchanie (Interrogation) is a powerful movie about a certain time in Polish history, that was marked by censorship and oppression and this is where Antonina ‘Tonia’ Dziwisz is caught up in. Played by one of Poland’s most remarkable actresses, Krystyna Janda, it is her that along with the wonderful cinematography work and realistic portrayal of prison conditions makes this movie so incredible. It is through her eyes that we see the story unfold and the suffering of her and her prison inmates (with some great co-acting by the likes of Agnieszka Holland). This is along with Krzysztof Kieslowski’s and Andrzej Wajda’s finest work one of the defining moments of Polish cinema, and beyond that. Certainly one of the most powerful prison movies ever made in my book, not just within the perspective of Polish or European cinema as such. And in the wake of events like Guantanamo bay or Abu Ghraib it still is as fresh and important with the covered subject as it was when it was made, reminding us how things could go horribly wrong within a judicial and in the end prison system. Due to it’s critical stance at the time of making, it was banned by the local government for 7 years, until the Soviet bloc broke up. An extremely powerful reminder of that time.Read More »

A boy shyly watches a girl on a tram. Only when he exits the tram, and its too late, does he realize that he must meet her. (IMDb)Read More »

This is a collection of Hieronim Neumann’s experimental film and animation work from 1979 to 2005.Read More »

Quote:
Here is a film before which words fall silent. “The Mill & the Cross” contains little dialogue, and that simple enough. It enters into the world of a painting, and the man who painted it. If you see no more than the opening shots, you will never forget them. It opens on a famous painting, and within the painting, a few figures move and walk. We will meet some of those people in more detail.

The painting is “The Way to Calvary” (1564), by the Flemish master Pieter Bruegel the Elder. We might easily miss the figure of Christ among the 500 in the vast landscape. Others are going about their everyday lives. That’s a reminder of Bruegel’s famous painting “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus,” about which Auden wrote of a passing ship “that must have seen something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” Extraordinary events take place surrounded by ordinary ones.Read More »