British director Tobias Morgan is in the southern Polish city of Katowice to shoot "Bękart", a multi-faceted tale of conflicting ideologies, social injustice and revolution
Morgan began considering Katowice as a location at last year's Ars Independent Film Festival. According to Przemysław Sołtysik, a representative at the Katowice - City of Gardens Institute for city promotion, he met with Iranian producer and film distributor Katayoun Shahabi. After Mohammad Rasoulof was imprisoned in September 2011 following the broadcast on BBC Persian of a documentary about Iranian Supreme Leader ayatollah Khamenei, Morgan was presented with the idea to make a film about conflicted ideologies, social injustice and revolution as a tribute. "Unable to film in Iran, Morgan extrapolated an idea of 'representing a thing by its opposite' and wrote the script for 'Bękart", said Sołtysik.
"Bękart" is an 85-minute, Polish-language feature film about a violent, disaffected football hooligan, an isolated political radio DJ and a disturbed cult of musicians in exile whose lives collide in one night in the industrial city of Katowice. The film takes a deep look into the loss of archives, the inexistence of history and the idea of people disappeared and erased in time.
"Bękart" is a translation from the original English title "Bastard Child". According to the filmmakers, "the film is defined by this word: difficult, awkward, resembling a known species of idea but not truly such. It is a film about memory, time and violence".
Filmed on Canon digital SLRs and original 1980s Polish television Betacam, it is set in real contemporary Europe. The film is characterised by a near-seamless flow of continual camera movement: long takes with minimal cuts, interrupted only by sudden bursts of time-stuttered, ecstatic visions. The soundtrack is ground on a bed of raw guitar noise and drumming, extending to wild jazz punk noise and sonic vandalism.
The film is an international collaboration between two main parties: the International Film Festival Ars Independent (Katowice, Poland) and Autr Films (London, UK), a small independent production company run by filmmaker Tobias Elijah Morgan.
Morgan Tobias is a theatre and film director. He is a founder and producer of the MUBI Garage, an independent film screening and Video on Demand platform for emerging filmmakers. He also founded and directed Cine Foundation International, the organization fighting for the human rights in the field of cinematography.
The film began shooting in early 2012.
Source: Katowice - City of Gardens Institute