Najib Oudghiri and Helen McCrory in. Katarzyna Klimkiewicz's "Flying Blind"
Touted as a "sexual thriller" based around a circumspect romance between an engineer and a student in the post-9/11 aftermath, Kasia Klimkiewicz’s Flying Blind is the winner of the Bath Film Festival 2012 Audience Award
Frankie is a 40-something successful aerospace engineer with a solid social standing, Kahil is 24-year-old French-Algerian student and illegal immigrant. They embark on a passionate love story. Throughout their romance, Frankie’s job creeps into the most intimate realms of her life. Professional yet vulnerable toward Kahil, one morning she is detained by the security services and told that he is deemed a "person of interest". Screen Invasion’s Daniel Sarath calls Katarzyna Klimkiewicz’s weave of widely contrasting genres "effortless" and done with "remarkable control", and the Edinburgh Film Festival, where Flying Blind premiered, called the filme "a stylish mix" of love story and political thriller.
Drawn from director Marcin Janiec’s experience of fighting with cancer, The Game is a thrilling chess match taking place somewhere between life and death. The stakes are high - a gateway to the world of living. The sole referee of this tournament is a figure with whom no one wishes to cross paths. The 5-minute animated short fantasy is making the rounds of international festivals and garnering awards (Best Animation at the Atlanta Shortfest, Rising Star at the Canada International Film Festival, Best in Show at the The Indie Fest).
Katarzyna Klimkiewicz, a graduate of the Łódź Film School, director of the award-winning 2009 short film Hanoi-Warszawa, is from a generation of Polish filmmakers conscious of the trauma caused by communism yet seeing it as one of many political aberrations. She is interested in how a political system influences desires, feelings and possibilities of a human being.
The Game is Marcin Janiec's first film. A computer-graphic designer and painter with a degree in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, his animation is part of the move toward computer-animated productions in Poland.
The Bath Film Festival is known for its range of feature documentaries and its annual Sound to Silents section, where a musician is commissioned to compose and perform original music for a silent film.
Screenings:
Flying Blind: 18th of November 2012 at 9 pm in the Little Theatre Cinema
The Game: 20th of November 2012 at 6:50 pm in the Rondo Theatre
Sources: Bath Film Festival, culture.pl
Thumbnail credit: Picture Houses
Editor: Marta Jazowska