Still from Jaroszuk's "Frozen Stories"
Grzegorz Jaroszuk's film is a tongue-in-cheek story about a young man and woman who work at the same supermarket. When they're dubbed the company's worst employees, they need to find a new purpose and start a better, more valuable life in just two days.
When the man and woman decide to embark on a new life path, they get unexpected help from a popular game show. The film is a perverse tale of two social outsiders and their attempts to overcome the impasse in life.
Jaroszuk's Frozen Stories / Opowieści z chłodni competes in the International Narrative Short Films section at Sundance 2012; its lineup consists of 27 short films from 16 countries around the world. This year, the Short Film programme features a total of 64 short films selected from among a record 7,500 submitted films.
Frozen Stories has already received a number of film awards, including an award of the American Film Institute, which made the film eligible for the Academy Awards. Frozen Stories has also been nominated for a European Film Award.
The film was co-financed by the Polish Film Institute, and produced by the National Film School in Łódź and EasyBusyProductions.
The Sundance Film Festival has been held annually since 1978, and is one of the major US festivals, and now one of the most important events that promote independent cinema. Every year the festival is flooded with over 11,000 entries vying for the main prize. The competition programme includes feature films and documentaries, both feature-length and and short films. This is not the first time a Polish film is featured in the short-film competition. At the last festival, Jakub Stożek's short ducumentary Out of reach / Poza zasięgiem won a special mention, whilst in 2010, two Polish films - Magnus von Horn's Echo and Jenifer Malmqvist's Birthday competed for the main prize.
The 2012 of the Sundance Film Festival runs between the 19th-29th of January, 2012 in Park City, Utah. Nicholas Jarecki's film "Arbitrage", starring Richard Gere and Susan Sarandon is also on the programme at Sundance this year. Co-production and post-production services for the film were rendered by the Kraków-based company Alvernia Production.
For more information about the Sundance Film Festival, see: www.sundance.org.
Source: Polish Film Institure; polishshorts.pl