Still from Dorota Kędzierzawska's "Tomorrow Will be Better", photo: KidFilm.
Presenting two films by a director who requires no introduction and two more from a filmmaker whose characters have typically been pushed to the margins of society, there are 8 full-length features and 21 short films from Poland in the Poland Cinema Review at Tehran’s 31st Fajr International Film Festival.
Film and theatre director, scriptwriter, set designer and winner of the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2000, Andrzej Wajda is esteemed for transcribing observations on political and historical matters into cinematic reality. Katyń, Wajda's widely discussed 2007 production, is based on wartime massacres in the Katyń Forest of eastern Russia. Some 22,000 Polish citizens, of whom 10,000 were military officers, were murdered by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, on government orders in April and May of 1940. Wajda's film is set after the war as one officer’s mother, wife and daughter await his return from the prisoner-of-war camps of the USSR, while a culture of denial settles on communist Poland. The first feature film to focus on a painful episode in Polish history that remains an unsettling topic, Wajda’s film centres on a family's separation, individual suffering in the face of communal collusion, and emotions that follow incomprehensible acts by a despotic regime. Wajda’s second film screened in the Tehran programme, Man of Iron, is the 1981 production that won the Palme d’Or in Cannes. The film depicts the rise of the Solidarity union and complicated human fates at the dawn of a new political era in Poland.
Film director and writer Dorota Kędzierzawska takes on topics concerning people pushed to the margins of society, who are poor, lonely, weak and helpless. Her characters await love, help and human understanding, however hopeless the wait may be. Tomorrow Will Be Better, screened in Tehran, is a Polish-Japanese co-production based on a real-life story. Three homeless boys - Pietia, Wasia and Liapa - live in the bowels of a Russian railway station. They set off for Poland in hope of finding a new home. After an exhausting journey, the boys are deported to Russia. Despite their heartbreaking fate, the children show strength of will and endurance.
While Kędzierzawska's films touch on homelessness, abuse and abandonment, their imagery is filled with vast expanses of water, sand and sky. Reviewers have noted the contrast between serene beauty in the cinematography and cruel topics that are foremost in the films. The director's Time to Die, another of the eight Polish features at the festival, is called a "stunning cinematic sonnet about the everyday existence and vivid memories of an enchanting elderly woman", by Arthur Reinhart of the San Francisco International Film Festival, where Time to Die screened earlier in 2013. "Shot in gorgeous black and white by cinematographer Arthur Reinhart, the film is a wonder to behold." Dorota Kędzierzawska attends the Fajr Film Festival.
Another festival feature, which blurs the line between cinema and art, is director Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross. Inspired by Pieter Bruegel's painting The Procession to Calvary from 1564, the film re-creates panoramic landscapes from the time of Christ. Using innovative CGI technology, Majewski takes viewers into the aesthetic universe of Bruegel's painting, as one watches the dual evolutions of its being painted and the lives of the characters - both in the painting and later involved with the painting. The imaginative creative process took Majewski and his team three years. The Mill and the Cross stars Charlotte Rampling, Rutger Hauer and Michael York.
The selection of Polish short films shown at the festival are Studio Munk productions. The Fajr International Film Festival in Teheran, organised since 1982, is consider the biggest film festival in the Middle East.
List of Polish films screened in Teheran:
Andrzej Wajda - Katyń
Andrzej Wajda - Man of Iron
Dorota Kędzierzawska - Tomorrow Will Be Better
Dorota Kędzierzawska - Time to Die
Krzysztof Krauze - My Nikifor
Krzysztof Zanussi - Life
Lech J. Majewski - The Mill and the Cross
Roman Polański - Carnage
Short films:
Tomasz Bagiński - The Cathedral
Rafał Kapeliński - Konfident
Michał Wnuk - What Doctors Say
Monika Jordan-Młodzianowska - Easter
Marcin Bortkiewicz - Drawn from Memory
Jakub Cuman - The Contest
Jan Matuszyński - Heaven
Jarosław Konopka - Underlife
For more information see: Fajr International Film Festival website
Sources: based on the article by Bartosz Staszczyszyn for culture.pl
Editor: Marta Jazowska