Still from Slawomir Fabicki's "Loving", photo: WFF
Sławomir Fabicki's intimate drama Loving receives the Golden Prometheus, the main prize at the 13th Tbilisi International Film Festival. Tato Kotetishvili 's work from the Łódź Film School, Watermelon, wins the short film competition.
Loving, Fabicki's second feature, is a strikingly intimate portrait of a couple undergoing a crisis. Capturing the dynamic between the husband and wife, the film unveils the incredible strength of women, premised on the director’s conviction that "women are stronger than men and braver in the face of adversity, " as he said in an interview for culture.pl. The film is also a story about love faced with life-altering shifts, and requiring refinement and redefinition.
The film was inspired by a newspaper article by Lidia Ostałowska for the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza in 2008, entitled To się stało mojej żonie / This is what happened to my wife. It concerned a well-know case of sexual abuse in the Olsztyn city council, written from the point of view of the husband of one of the molestation victims. Loving does not make a sensation of the affair. Fabicki directs an intimate drama, taking a hard look at the protagonists and focusing on how they relate and react to each other. As the drama unfolds, habits that were set in stone start crumbling. What seemed certain turns out to be fragile. Trust, closeness, desire, security - nothing seems to be sure anymore. Tomek (Marcin Dorociński) and Marysia (Julia Kijowska) have to ask themselves what feelings they can salvage.
Fabicki, a lecturer at his alma mater, the Łódź Film School, was the Polish candidate for the Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film category with his first feature Retrieval / Z odzysku, from 2006. The film was nominated to the European Film Awards and received a special mention from the Ecumenical Jury of Un Certain Regard at Cannes. Loving is his second feature, and actress Julia Kijowski received the Best Female Actress Award at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in Greece in November 2012, for her role as Marysia.
The Tbilisi festival's award for Best Short film went to a 10-minute short by Georgian director Tato Kotetishvili, titled Watermelon. A Polish-Georgian production from 2012, the film is a day in the life of a watermelon vendor in a remote area of Georgia. A man puts up a watermelon stall, and the occasional local drivers pass without stopping. Only tourists stop, to have a photo taken in front of such a peculiar sight. To make things worse, another vendor puts up his stall opposite. Tato Kotetishvili, born in 1987, is a student of the Cinematography Department at the Film School in Łódź.
The Tbilisi International Film Festival, established in 2000, introduces Georgian audiences to domestic and international films of high artistic value. The festival runs in parallel to meetings of industry professionals, workshops, master classes, retrospectives and other events.
Sources: based on the article by Bartosz Staszczyszyn for culture.pl, culture.pl, Tbilisi International Film Festival
Editor: Marta Jazowska