Film and theatre director, screenwriter and documentary filmmaker Wojciech Smarzowski represents the creative contingent of Polish cinema makers that emerged after the year 2000. For 10 years, between the fall of communism in Poland and the year 2000, the film industry, once subsidised by the regime, had to adapt to reduced support from the government budget. films would no longer be censored, but economics in the transition period demoted the role of cinema in social life. Cheap reproductions of Hollywood action films were made, and the masters of cinema - Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Zanussi - found it hard to adapt to the new realities.
A new current in Polish cinema emerged with the establishment of the Polish Film Institute in 2002, which finances film production, supports young filmmakers and promotes Polish cinema abroad. In 2004, Smarzowski, who was "doubtful about making a film in the official system" - i.e. with a sufficient budget - made The Wedding, an independent movie on a small budget. The film received a mention at the Locarno Film Festival and brought him unexpected recognition in Poland. Other prizes include the Jury Special Prize and prize for Male Role at the Gdynia Film Festival, seven Eagles - the Polish Film Prize - and a Polityka magazine Passport award.
The Wedding
The Wedding / Wesele is an adaptation of an important piece of Polish culture - Stanisław Wyspiański's play of that title from 1901. Smarzowski's film updates the original's critical, sarcastic exposure of 19th-century Polish society. Against the backdrop of the wedding of the pregnant daughter of a rich villager who marries her off to a man who agrees to take her for his wife in exchange for a modern sports car, Smarzowski drew a caricature of Polish society and all its national sins. To evade the cold, calculating gangster who delivered the sports car, the father bribes a notary, a policeman and even the priest. In contrast to Wyspianski’s country folk, intoxicated by visions of the struggle for national independence, Smarzowski’s villagers are preoccupied with envy and greed.
The Varlovy Vary film festival programmers, when The Wedding was shown there, called it a "blackly absurd comedy of unchecked monetary obsession". The wedding - the film's priest nonchalantly says "If no-one gets thrashed, a wedding's a failure" - is a metaphor of the overall state of society. "Even if many of the cultural references are lost in translation", Anna Smith writes for the BBC Films website, "others survive the journey: drunken wedding guests get everywhere, after all". Smith notes the "Severed digits, dead bodies, exploding toilets, forbidden nookie and lashings and lashing of vodka. If all this makes it sound like a gross-out comedy, think again: this is a grim, intense world in which the only laughs are jet black".
The Dark House
The strength of Smarzowski's cinema lies in his portraying a rotten universe. The Dark House / Dom zły from 2009 is set during martial law in Poland in the 1980s. In the Bieszczady Mountains in remote southeast Poland, an unemployed zootechnics specialist with a dark past and a growing drinking problem tries to start over with a clean slate. Taking up a new job at a State Agricultural Farm in the region, he makes an accidental stopover in a farmhouse. He stays for the night with a random family.
Initial distrust between guest and hosts is quickly dispelled and turns into friendship. A plan of making a joint business arises, then passion and lust lead to surprising, tragic consequences. The unfolding story is intertwined with a parallel one which sees the protagonist four years later, during the martial-law era, taking part in a reenactment of the events that traspired at the house during his visit.
The Dark House questions the image of the Polish People's Republic shown in Stanisław Bareja's comedies, as an expression of the need to restore appropriate balance. Smarzowski shows degraded people who drink and commit evil, and simultaneously he comments bitingly on the myth of Solidarity - a founding legend of the new Poland. The Dark House received three awards at the Gdynia Film Festival, an award for its cinematographer, Krzysztof Ptak, at the Camerimage Cinematography festival, and four Eagle Awards.