Jakub Gierszał and Magdalena Berus in Jacek Borcuch's "Lasting", photo: Krakow Festival Office
The 2013 Sundance Film Festival brought two prizes for the Poles: Michał Englert is the Winner of the Cinematography Award: World Cinema Dramatic and Grzegorz Zariczny’s documentary The Whistle wins the Short Film Grand Jury Prize.
Twenty-year-old Michał (Jakub Gierszał) and Karina (Magdalena Berus), two Polish students, meet in Valencia, Spain, while on a summer job, and fall head over heels for each other. Their holiday romance is broken up by a dramatic event that changes their lives irrevocably. Provoked into a fight, Michał kills a man. Their idle life turn into a nightmare, and their feelings are put to the test. Nieulotne / Lasting is a love story that shows "Through the eyes of young people, [...] the collapse of their seemingly well-ordered world," as director Jacek Borcuch told the Polish Press Agency.
A Spanish co-production, the film features Spanish actors Angela Molina and Juanjo Ballesta and stars Jakub Gierszał, awarded the Poland 2012 Shooting Star, and Magdalena Berus, known for her role as a teenage mother in Katarzyna Rosłaniec's Baby Blues, which was featured at the 2012 Toronto Film Festival. Gierszał, known for his skill in balancing hysteria and emotional truth and referred to as the Polish James Dean, was awarded for portraying Dominik in Jan Komasa's Suicide Room. With Lasting, he stars in a Jacek Borcuch film for the second time, having played in Wszystko, co kocham / All That I Love in 2009 as Kazik, one of the boys in a Polish punk rock group during the politically turbulent early 1980s. All That I Love was the first Polish film to be featured at the Sundance Festival, and a candidate for Best Foreign Film at the 2011 Academy Awards (it was not selected for the Academy's short list).
Lasting's script is a collaboration between Borcuch, Claudia Llosa, the Peruvian artist-author of The Milk of Sorrow (the Golden Bear recipient in Berlin in 2009), and director Jasmila Žbanića from Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose film Grabavica was also awarded at the Berlin International Film Festival. "Jacek concentrated on male role in the script, Jasmina and Claudia helped to bring forth the role of the girl", said the film's producer, Piotr Kobus, in an interview with Paweł T. Felis from the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. Michał Englert is cinematographer on the project, which began filming in Valencia then moved to southern Poland in autumn 2010. The score is composed by Daniel Boom, and Elwira Pluta is in charge of production design. Lasting is produced by Piotr Kobus and Agnieszka Drewno for the Manana company.
Jacek Borcuch (born 1970) is a director, screenwriter, actor and musician. A graduate in philosophy and at the Theatre Academy in Warsaw and the Music Theatre in Gdynia, he made his acting breakthrough with his role in Krzysztof Krauze's film Dług / The Debt in 1999. Publicity surrounding Krauze's film helped promote Borcuch's own project, the film Kallafiorr, Polish cinema's first truly independent production. His Tulipany / Tulips in 2005 brought well-known and much-loved actors in front of the camera who had been Polish cinema stars in the 1970s. The foundation for Borcuch's third film, Wszystko co kocham / All That I Love, is the musical passion of brothers who are members of the band Physical Love. It is a story about teenagers growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, during the initial Solidarity movement, faced with their first grown-up choices regarding personal feelings revolutionary politics.
Borcuch's fourth feature, Lasting, comes to cinemas in Poland on the 8th of February 2013.
Grzegorz Zariczny’s documentary The Whistle wins the Short Film Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival 2013. The annual Sundance Film Festival, a leading American festival since its inception in 1978, is now among the important film events promoting international independent cinema.
See more information on the festival website: Sundance 2013
Sources: Bartek Staszczyszyn's article for culture.pl, Krakow Festival Office press release, culture.pl, The News.pl, Sundance
Editor: Marta Jazowska