Still from Jerzy Domaradzki's "The Fifth Season of the Year", photo: Przemysław Jendroska / Kino Świat
Two unlikely love stories, one between a former soldier of the Polish Armia Krajowa (Home Army) and the widow of a German soldier, the other between a retired piano teacher and a driver. Rose and The Fifth Season of the Year, the two Polish films screened at the 35th International Film Festival in Cairo, Egypt, are about overcoming even the largest differences.
"A gently likable drama", as SBS reviewers put it, Jerzy Domaradzki’s Piąta pora roku / The Fifth Season of the Year is a dark comedy and a road movie with "two wonderful lead performances and a soft thematic touch". Barbara (Ewa Wiśniewska) meets Wiktor (Marian Dziędziel) at the funeral of her lifelong love. On the surface, the two have nothing in common. Witek is a taxi driver who never left Silesia and Barbara is a retired music teacher. Wishing to fulfill her partner's dying wish and bury his ashes at sea, she turns to Witek for help. As they travel north to the Polish shore, they confront the very foundations of their characters, their different educations, faiths, values and life experiences, and become friends. "They feel how much they need each other", director Jerzy Domaradzki says in an interview with the daily Rzeczpospolita. "And they see that there is still something before them". The Fifth Season of the Year is screened in the main competition of the Cairo Festival.
Featured in the festival's Human Rights Competition is Wojciech Smarozwski’s war-time love drama Rose, one of Poland’s most awarded films in recent years. In the district of Mazury (Masuria), located along the former Polish-Prussian border, it is the summer of 1945. Tadeusz (Marcin Dorociński), a former soldier of the AK, or Home Army, arrives in the area. He lost everything in the war, and comes to a house owned by a woman named Rose (Agata Kulesza). Rose lives by herself, on a large farm. She treats Tadeusz coolly, refusing to admit that she needs protection against looters and marauder bands that frequently trespass on her property. But gradually Tadeusz and Rose open up. He learns her dramatic story, brutally raped by soldiers, forced into prostitution by the Soviets, and now treated with contempt by new settlers in the district, who look upon her as a German. Director Wojciech Smarzowski spoke to Culture.pl about the nature of the film:
The film's basic plot is a story about love – tough and built on ruins. She is a Masurian, German, Polish perhaps. The term is relative and depends on political manipulation, which was particularly severe at that time. Nonetheless, above all she is a woman who suffered from the Russians and later from the Poles; who experienced tragedy and the worst of humiliations. She is a Pole whose life was ruined by Russians and Germans, by war and occupation. She is a human wreck. A ghost.
The Cairo Film Festival is among the 14 important competitive film festivals in the world. The festival was cancelled in 2011 due to political turmoil in Egypt, and the 35th edition this year is held under the motto "Positive Thinking: Revolution and Freedom". The International Human Rights Competition was introduced in 2012, within this context.
Sources: culture.pl, PISF, SBS, Tofifest
Editor: Marta Jazowska