Still from Jan Jakub Kolski's "To Kill a Beaver"
A cinematic experience of what it feels like to not perceive the world through the sense of sight, a look at the struggle for success of three young men that leads to suicide and an attempt to untangle life's most difficult questions on screen without anesthesia. Six Polish movies add to the darkness at the 16th International Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
A relationship based on painful memories, disregard and carelesness. The three generations of men in Piotr Trzaskalski's My Father's Bike - a grandfather, his son and grandson - are estranged and lack empathy and understanding for one another. They are unaware of how similar they are and how their negative attitudes influence each other. When the youngest asks his father, "Were you happy when I was born?", the man answers, "Of course I was happy. What else was I supposed to do?". My Father's Bike is optimistic nevertheless, and pictures the attempts to fix their relationships - and "music is the food of family-bonding" as Neil Young writes in the Hollywood Reporter. The film's cast includes Polish jazz virtuouso Michał Urbaniak in the role of the grandfather. At the Black Nights Film Festival, My Father's Bike is in the main competition, called EurAsia.
In Sławomir Fabicki's Loving, on the other hand, the seemingly stable relationship of a wife and husband starts to fall apart after the woman is raped by her boss and keeps it a secret from her spouse. Habits that were set in stone start crumbling. What seemed certain, turns out to be fragile. Trust, closeness, desire, security - nothing seems sure anymore. Writing for culture.pl, Bartek Staszczyszyn calls Loving a "true and touching story, a painful vivsection of emotions unrolling before our eyes." The film's particularity is evident in its lacks of a music score and in very minor movement of the camera, which remains almost immobile throughout. With no conjuring of drama or excessive emotions, the protagonists' naturally surging feelings become the priority, leaving the viewer with a raw image. Loving is a runner-up in the Tridens Herling Competition, which includes full-length features and second films from Baltic and Nordic filmmakers.
Out of competition at, the Black Nights Festival are three other films from 2012: Andrzej Jakimowski's Imagine, Jan Jakub Kolski's To Kill a Beaver, and Leszek Dawid's You Are God. The first shows how a young blind man's strength of will motivates other visually impaired people when he teaches them how to walk without a cane, using a complex network of sound cues. To Kill a Beaver is the story of a 37-year-old paranoid veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, caught by the demons of his traumatic past. Leszek Dawid's You Are God is, the story of Paktofonika, one of Poland's pioneer hip-hop collectives. It is set in Silesian housing projects where three boys struggle to make it big in the fervent capitalism of the early 1990s. International critics have called the film the 8 Mile of Poland.
The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival is among Northern Europe's biggest film events. Bgeun in 1997, it has expanded its scope from Nordic films to include the work of Eurasian directors. The Festival's 16th edition coincides with the 100th anniversary of Estonian cinema.
Sources: 16th Tallinn Black Nights Festival, culture.pl, Hollywood Reporter
Editor: Marta Jazowska