Jerzy Skolimowski: Polish Actor & Director Has Been Nominated for an Oscar!
Io by Jerzy Skolimowski is among five foreign-language films nominated for the 2023 Oscar.
The Oscar nomination for Skolimowski's film was no surprise. It crowned the film's many-week triumphal procession across the USA. Only in recent weeks, Io was awarded as the best foreign language film by choice of the New York Critics Association, while the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the American National Society of Film Critics gave it its awards for best cinematography in a foreign film. Skolimowski's film has been reviewed by major industry magazines, from The Hollywood Reporter to Chicago Tribune, Deadline, Indie Wire and The New Yorker, with Monohla Dargis of The New York Times calling it the most important film of the past year.
In 2022, Jerzy Skolimowski's picture won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and Paweł Mykietyn, the author of the film's music, received the European Film Award and the Cannes Soundtrack Award.
The Polish film will compete for an Oscar with such films as the German All Quiet on the Western Front by Edward Berger based on the classic novel by E.M. Remarque, the Belgian Close by Lucas Dhont, the Irish The Quiet Girl by Colm Bairéad and the Argentinian Argentina, 1985 by Santiago Miter.
Donkey in the lead role
Io is one of the most original Polish films of the last decade. A philosophical essay and an ecological manifesto by a rebellious artist who, even in his eighties, proves to be one of the most youthful and courageous minds of the Polish cinema. In Io he tells the story of a donkey picked up from a provincial circus and set on a journey to one of Italian slaughterhouses. Accompanying him on this journey, we become observers of the modern world – full of absurdities, saturated with selfishness, violence and human thoughtlessness.
Referencing Robert Bresson's masterpiece, Au Hasard Balthazar from 1966 (another story about a donkey and a girl), Skolimowski makes Io a witness to prosecution in a trial against humankind. Because Io is a story about cruelty towards nature and the brutality with which we 'subdue Earth'.
Skolimowski's dazzlingly beautiful picture takes the form of a philosophical essay in which the visual and the musical dimensions are important as the on-screen events. Young Michał Dymek's daring cinematography combine symbolic power with documentary observation, making Io at times reminiscent of a music video, while at other - an intimate documentary about an animal with a soul. Paweł Mykietyn's wonderful, expressive music, as well as Agnieszka Glińska's editingthe make Io one of the most important and boldest pictures of Polish cinema in recent years, perhaps even decades.
The winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film will be announced on March 13, 2023
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