Tag: Poland

The Balcony Movie (Film balkonowy)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TRANSYLVANIA

The Balcony Film is both simple and profound, a bare-bones documentary that seems to be about everything and everybody. Director Paweł Łozinski simply sits on his balcony with a camera and a boom mike on a pole, and asks people questions about their lives, their days and the meaning of life itself. The result is a funny, heartfelt and panoramic view of life in contemporary Poland.

Although shot before the coronavirus pandemic, it’s the kind of small-scale film that feels of the moment; a way of exploring the world without ever having to leave your own small corner of it. Paweł looks for heroes. Some people are reticent to respond, others are more than happy to confess their entire lives, while others offer acres of wit and humanity, often within the same scene.

The set-up is simple. The film starts with a static frame, half of the picture bisected by the fence of separating his apartment building from the rest of the street. Someone passes by and he asks them if they would like to talk. We see all sorts, from the old ladies missing their husbands to homeless people to young women talking about their work. One women tries to sell him new curtains. Even his wife and dog star, with his beloved berating him for doing his work while she has to shop and walk and attend to other domestic duties.

Poland is a Catholic country, with priests and devout people passing by, and even the locals seeming to treat the process like confession. There is the gay man who tells of living with his late partner while pretending that was his brother; there is the recently widowed woman who is starting life again and says she’s truly happy for the first time; there is a clearly unwell woman who says that she doesn’t feel “defined” yet; there is a man who finally quit drinking and now has to understand what life is all about. Just from a window, Warsaw life is gloriously revealed to us, resulting in one of the best films of the year.

Shot over the course of the year, we get a sense of the full Polish seasons, from sunny spring and winter to the melancholy autumn to the freezing cold and snow and sludge of winter. Characters repeat themselves, with any one of them threatening to become the film’s main protagonist.

Eventually a man worthy of redemption emerges, Robert, a man just out of jail who has to rebuild his whole life. He starts by begging, but after being gifted a shirt from Paweł he looks for a job. He finds one, but still has to sleep on the street, on night buses, with nuns or in homeless shelters. He’s completely burned out. Nonetheless, he keeps on going. What else can he do?

Although not overtly political, Łozinski doesn’t shy away from the issues in Polish life either from gay rights to nationalism (with a disturbing street rally seemingly professing love for the Polish state which actually is just an excuse to bash migrants) to the degradation of postal workers to the problems with the public healthcare system. But it also has a truly universal feel, capturing life in all its mess, wonder and mystery. I want this film to start a franchise. Let’s do it in every country in the world.

We don’t find out the meaning of life, but I do feel anyone who watches this film feels like they might get just one step closer. An old lady right at the ends has an almost perfect response: “Life is meaning.” We just have to go about our days, do our little tasks, love the people around us, and everything will be alright. The answer to life appears to just be in living it.

The Balcony Movie plays in the Focus Poland section of the Transylvanian International Film Festival, running from 17th to 26th June.

Other People (Inni ludzie)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

The first ever album I bought was The Streets’ A Grand Don’t Come From Me. Brummie Mike Skinner rapped about normal life — losing money, girlfriends, nights out — and wrapped it up into an epic story about trying to get yourself together. Rap music has always told stories, from “Children’s Story” to Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day”, but there is something particularly special about stretching that conceit over a larger narrative form while telling a story basically anyone could relate to.

That’s why Other People, despite its miserablist approach, provides such a pleasurable narrative experience, using hip-hop’s potential to paint a wide tapestry of contemporary Warsaw life. Its central protagonist, Kamil (Jacek Beler) is an aspiring rapper, living in an identikit apartment block in a city constantly blanketed in grey. His daily routine (avoiding the tram fare, stealing small items from the mall, getting wasted with his friends) is recounted in minute detail by a man (Sebastian Fabjański) with Jesus thorns and baseball cap, providing a deadpan one-man Greek chorus.

And if Mike Skinner was self-effacing in the way he played himself in something like “Fit But You Know It”, Beler’s Kamil is positively self-hating, unable to process his childhood or find any kind of meaning in his life. He doesn’t even have the beats for his raps. At least he contains some kind of sexual magnetism that allows him to sleep with both trophy housewife Iwona (Sonia Bohosiewicz) and shop worker Aneta (Magdalena Kolesnik). The questions is not so much who he will end up with, but will he end up being someone, subsumed by a giant, dark city, forbidding tower blocks, a lack of economic prospects and an endless proclivity for cannabis and vodka…

The film cannot be separated from its form, which allows for quick jumps between memory and present, character and perspective without feeling messy or in a rush. Adopted from the epic rap poem by Dorota Masłowska, it has a novelistic rhythm and perspective. Not everyone is particularly accomplished with their flow. No matter. Like the bad singers in Everyone Says I Love You (Woody Allen, 1996), or Mike Skinner himself sometimes, hip-hop is shown here to be more about personal expression than technical mastery. Everyone joins in: no matter whether they are on the tram or in the midst of coitus. The freewheeling nature of the raps are so well-integrated into the narrative it makes me want to see Terpínska take on a Goodfellas-style (Martin Scorsese, 1990) movie. She’ll certainly be able to find the right milieu.

If Aleksandra Terpińska’s previous short The Best Fireworks Ever (2017) — which literally told the dystopian story of Poland descending into civil war — felt overly critical of the direction the country is going in, Other People seems even more damning for being set in the present day. This is a world where people console themselves with consumerism, post fake lives on social media while feeling depressed, drown in never-ending debt and use sex, drugs and alcohol as temporary respite from the void. It should feel like a slog, but spurred on by razor-sharp editing and game performances, this film contains both great vitality and compassion in amidst its characters’ ugliness.

No one comes off well, especially Kamil in a particularly troublesome rubbishing of the #metoo movement, but no one is particularly dislikable either. They’re living in a world that’s dying while trying to find something, anything to hold onto. These Other People are certainly more normal than the so-called “normal people” of Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Totally unflinching in her approach, Terpińska has delivered on the banal yet beautiful promise of The Streets nearly two decades later, delivering a polyphonic drama that entices as it repels.

Getting Away With Murder(s)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

There’s something about the enormity of the issues involved here that makes this a very tough watch. (If it wasn’t, there would be something wrong. The Holocaust is not an easy issue to deal with. Films about it can consequently be tough to watch. And so they should be.) That combined with the near three-hour running time (this is not a complaint, honest) means it sat on my pending review pile for quite a while before I finally sat down and watched it.

I suspect Wilkinson is aware of this problem. As the film starts, he takes you (as it were) gently by the hand as he walks into Auschwitz and matter-of-factly discusses its horrors, helped by a man who works in the museum there and has probably helped numerous people before and since to come to terms with the implications of the place as they go round it. Insofar as one ever can.

We learn of the arrivals off the incoming cattle trucks who were told to go down the ten-minute walk to the showers to get themselves cleaned up. They would take off their clothes and fold them neatly so they could pick them up again afterwards. They were herded into the shower interiors, quite densely packed. And they never came out because these weren’t showers at all, but gas chambers used for the systematic elimination of many of the new arrivals. It’s sickening just to think about.

The people who herded them in were inmates themselves. If you were told you could do that job or join them in the gas chambers yourself, what would you do? [A quick aside: the extraordinary and brilliant subjective camera drama Son Of Saul (László Nemes, 2015) goes a long way to understanding an inmate who does this job. Not that that’s possible.] As I say, trying to comprehend the inhumanity of this is really, really hard. These inmate-workers would be told, “the only way out of here is through the chimney.”

The screen shows well-put together maps of the place and gruelling archive footage is presented throughout the film in a non-confrontational, non-sensationalised way which helps. However, this material is, on the most fundamental human level, horrible. There’s a part of you that just wants to get away from the screen and throw up. People shouldn’t treat each other like this. Yet history testifies that they do, and we should never forget the fact. It’s the reason we need films like this, and the reason you need to watch it. Lest we forget, as they say.

Which implies that we know it all already. For myself, though, there is much in this film I didn’t know. Ranging from specific details about perpetrators large and small in the overall process that was the Holocaust right the way through to the scale of the operation (six million Jews turns out both an oversimplification and an understatement) and all the complicated ins and outs of the legal aftermath of the attempts both to track down and administer justice to the numerous perpetrators alongside the numerous attempts of all those involved to evade justice, all to often successfully. Much of what’s shown here is an indictment of humanity, although all the way through there are signs of hope as perpetrators are convicted and justice done. But it seems that too many get (got) off scot free or with woefully inadequate punishment for their appalling crimes. It’s not surprising that someone should want to make a film to address the burning question about the injustice of all this. Kudos to Wilkinson for doing so.

It may make for harrowing and deeply upsetting viewing, but at the same time, it’s consistently compelling. And it absolutely screams out to be seen.

After Auschwitz we move on to France, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Austria and, eventually, Germany. In his own county of Yorkshire which has a population of 5.4 million, Wilkinson attempts to get his head round the sheer enormity of the figures. For comparison, both Denmark and the US State of Maryland have populations of six million. If all those in Yorkshire were killed, he asks, would the UK government remain silent?

York, where the film has its premiere, is the site of England’s largest massacre of Jews in 1190, when some 150 were killed. Lest we think such things could never happen here.

Wilkinson also travels to Galway, Ireland to see the grave of William Joyce who broadcast German propaganda during the war as Lord Hawhaw. He was captured, tried and, in 1946, executed. His case is comparatively cut and dried compared to what happened to those Germans who abetted the Holocaust.

After Germany’s defeat in 1945 and the shock of what they found in the death camps, the Allies vowed to bring the Holocaust’s perpetrators to justice. The International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg is often cited, but in fact that was held in a building with the capacity to house no more than 24 defendants of whom three never made it to trial and only 12 received the death sentence.

Matters were scarcely helped by the Nazis’ use of law under the Third Reich. Prior to that, law in most European countries had been based on the foundation of the Ten Commandments, but the regime effectively suspended such considerations, creating a legal framework under which it was permissible to eliminate specific ethnic and other minorities. The concept of ‘crimes against humanity’ didn’t exist until its instigation for the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, 1945-6.

Other trials followed, but the Allies failed to keep up the momentum as they became more concerned with the growing threat of the Soviets and the rise of the Cold War than with hunting down Nazi war criminals when Germany was economically on its knees. Finishing the job within Germany’s borders was left largely to Germany itself.

Where East Germany, as a newly formed Communist state, rebuilt its judiciary from scratch with entirely new appointments, West Germany retained many judges who had been in post during the Nazi era, many of whom were somewhat sympathetic to the murderers in the dock. In a very real sense, the post-war, West German judiciary had became Nazified.

Thus, in later West German trials, while some of the murderers received the full force of the law in the death penalty, many sentences were much more lenient or subsequently commuted so that, for example, a 20 year sentence became five years. There are also examples of murderers living in Germany who were never prosecuted, or who got off during a trial using the most spurious of defences. In many cases, these were people living under their real names.

Others fled, most infamously to South America, but to other countries as well, including the UK. In recent years, in his retirement, Nazi hunter Dr. Stephen Ankier researched their whereabouts, often to find the perpetrators he unearthed die of illness or old age before they could be brought to trial. The UK’s record on finding and prosecuting the perpetrators has been poor.

Getting Away With Murder(s) had its premiere on Thursday 9th November in at the Everyman Cinema, York. Dates for further screenings around the UK are constantly being added: click here to see if your town or city is listed yet. If it isn’t, then tell your local cinema you want to see it.

The film is released in cinemas in the UK on Friday, October 1st, the 75th anniversary of the end of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.

Review originally published on Jeremy C. Processing. Reprinted by permission.

Erotica 2022

Posted on by victorfraga

Directed by five female directors and co-written with five female novelists, the Netflix anthology film Erotica 2022 could explain the spirit of Polish women and the reason behind the massive protest that spread throughout the country in October and November. The reason other than the constitutional tribunal’s decision to tighten anti-abortion law, that is.

In more or less metaphorical ways, the artists behind Erotica 2022 show the way women are treated like sex objects, toys or human incubators, with little or no say, and the way their needs — regardless of what they are — are considered less important than those of men. All the while, however, each chapter in this anthology is entertaining, beautifully shot, mind-tickling or pure fun. Erotica 2022 is a film in its own right, bearing visible signatures from its directors, and not just a visual protest song.

Some of the stories are more realistic than others, such as The Bear, set on a train and in snowy mountains and focused on female liberation through escape (which is one of the favorite themes of director Anna Jadowska, who also co-wrote the story with Grażyna Plebanek), while others have a more dystopian or science-fiction touch. If you sit still long enough other animals would come (directed by Jagoda Szelc and co-written with Ilona Witkowska) revolves around a woman (Sara Celler-Jezierska) witnessing the climate disaster and the passing of her beloved dog, an activity she finds far more absorbing than achieving an orgasm with her long-time boyfriend (Sebastian Pawlak). Men’s inability to get a big O is usually equated with women being frigid and faulty, a blame which is just one more form of female oppression.

Three of the five stories — Disappearance of Mrs. B (directed by Anna Kazejak, co-written with Nobel-prize winner Olga Tokarczuk), Hard (directed by Kasia Adamik, co-written with Joanna Bator) and Night Shift (directed by Olga Chajdas and co-written with Gaja Grzegorzewska — focus on more direct instances of abuse. In Adamik’s sci-fi story, a couple who has raised a bionic child tries to pass a test to get a biological one. The woman (Agnieszka Żulewska) does everything she is required to do, but her wild dreams of liberation put the goal of getting a child in jeopardy. Kazejak’s film, meanwhile, shows a not-so-distant future where conservative forces have triumphed over liberal ones and made women completely dependent on men.

Mrs. B (the hypnotising Agata Buzek) has to give her husband her salary, serve him his dinner, offer him her body, and focus on getting pregnant. She isn’t supposed to have her own desires or to ask any questions, while her husband (Andrzej Konopka) is allowed to lead a double, if not a triple life. When Mrs. B meets an intellectually appealing writer (Sebastian Stankiewicz), her senses are awoken, which leads to a quiet yet significant form of mutiny. By contrast, nothing is calm about the revolt stirred up by a mysterious and taciturn woman (Małgorzata Bela) in Night Shift. She puts on an elegant outfit, gets behind the wheel of a limo and cruises the town by night to punish male predators. This final chapter of the anthology couldn’t be more satisfying, showing that it’s the old world that should burn, not the witches that set it on fire.

Erotica 2022 was produced by Marta Lewandowska through her company Friends with Benefits. It is now available on Netflix.

This piece was originally published on Cineuropa.

25 Years of Innocence. The Case of Tomek Komenda (25 lat niewinności. Sprawa Tomka Komendy)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

A mixture of the miserablist prison drama and a good old-fashioned police procedural, 25 Years of Innocence plays like Shawshank Redemption stripped of any feel-good moments. A grim yet eventually hopeful examination of a true case of wrongful imprisonment in Poland, this true-life story has the potential to be a crossover success.

The film starts in the year 2000, with the young Tomasz Komenda (Piotr Trojan) hauled into an interrogation cell over the rape and murder of a young girl at a New Year’s Eve party three years prior. Beaten senseless by the police, he confesses to having sex with a fifteen-year-old outside of a village party miles away from his own town. With DNA evidence seemingly against him, and only a public defendant to state his case, he is sentenced to a brutal 25 years in jail.

With certain scenes directly evoking Shawshank Redemption, Jan Holoubek boldly stakes his own claim on the wrongfully imprisoned man genre. The other half of the film, concerning the reopened investigation to find the real men responsible, takes a more Fincheresque turn, filled with portentous conversations and fascinating open-ends. We get the sense, Zodiac-like, that something is being concealed from us, just out of view, giving the film a truly enigmatic appeal.

Holoubek, also behind noir Netflix series The Mire, has a great eye for forensic detail, poring over the details and allowing the viewer to become an active participant. While there is a bit too much showing and telling, making certain revelations feel a little overdone and redundant, there is great skill in the way so much history and detail has been compressed into a mere two hour movie.

Besides Trojan’s own gripping performance, playing a simple man suffering all types of iniquities, the film’s heart rests in two good people trying their best. The first is his mother Teresa Klémańska, played with relentless passion by Polish legend Agata Kelusza. The second is the dogged police inspector Remigiusz Korejwo (Dariusz Chojnacki) — a man who knows that going against his own colleagues could cost his career, but knows he has to do the right thing.

Eventually the case of Tomek Komenda finds its way to the supreme court, gripping the entire nation in the process. This film has already had great resonance in Poland, where it was released in September, already making nearly $4 million; a fine achievement in the age of coronavirus. I think it’s because it gets to the very heart of what justice is about. Whether it’s the police or the courts, the Komenda case shows what can happen when all the wrong elements of the justice system conspire.

Now with the current ruling party in Poland ironically called the Law and Justice party — despite the way they have removed several of the checks and balances that make for a free and fair government — 25 Years of Innocence shows why effective review and implementation of the law is more important than ever.

25 Years of Innocence plays as part of the First Feature competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.