Charlotte Rampling in Lech Majewski's "The Mill and the Cross", photo: Instytucja Filmowa Silesia Films
Fictionalizes the story of the characters in a painting and depicting the inalienable link between parents and their children and its consequences, Polish films make a bold entry at the Irish Film Festival.
Featured among the 13 entries of the World section, Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross, Bartek Konopka’s Fear of Falling and Rafael Lewandowski’s The Mole present a world of looming danger and unquenchable human passion.
Inspired by Pieter Bruegel's 1564 painting The Procession to Calvary and a book also called The Mill and the Cross, Lech Majewski’s film crowded with hundreds of villagers and red-caped horsemen, recreates the panoramic landscape of the time of Christ. Using innovative CGI technology, the filmmaker takes the viewer inside the aesthetic universe of the painting as one watches it being created and the lives of the characters - both in the painting and later involved with the painting - evolve. The creative process took three years, requiring a great deal of imagination. The film stars Charlotte Rampling, Rutger Hauer and Michael York. The Galway Film Fleadh organisers comment "Strikingly beautiful and as stunning as it is ambitious, The Mill and the Cross is a unique cinematic experience that blurs the lines between cinema and art".
Still from Bartek Konopka's "Fear of Falling", photo: Jacek Drygała / Kino Świat
Bartek Konopka’s Fear of Falling and Rafeal Lewandowski’s The Mole both center around the topic of the father – son relationship. An attempt to settle his own account with his father, Bartek Konopka presents a relationship in which the life of a son, a TV anchor living in Warsaw and expecting a child, is put on hold until he figures out how his father’s well being influences his life. Similarly Rafael Lewandowski captures the delicate connection between a father’s reputation and the image formed around it by his son. The young man’s reluctance to accept that his father was a mole and not a Solidarity hero, the denial drives him to murder the man who kept his father’s secret all these years.
Festival website: Galway Film Fleadh
Sources: culture.pl
Author: Marta Jazowska