Bread and Salt – Damian Kocur | #film

Bread and Salt – Damian Kocur

Damian Kocur’s debut film is a story about xenophobia and identity devoid of journalistic simplifications – it is one of the best Polish films of recent years. ‘Bread and Salt’ won awards at the Venice and Gdynia festivals.

Even before he stepped on the set of his debut feature, Damian Kocur was said to be one of the greatest talents of domestic cinema. Chleb i sól (Bread and Salt) confirms these assumptions, reinforcing Kocur’s image as a filmmaker of extraordinary sensitivity and even greater courage. After all, who else would take on such a great challenge as making his debut film with amateur actors and dressing his story in an almost documentary costume?

In the story of a young pianist who comes on holiday to his hometown, Kocur combines documentary observation with a talent for building dramatic tension. And again – as in his student film 1410 and the short film Dalej jest dzień (Beyond Is the Day) – he reaches for non-professional actors: in the role of Tymek, he casts Tymoteusz Bies, one of the most talented Polish pianists of the young generation, and in the role of his brother, Jacek... Jacek Bies. This is where literal fidelity to reality ends and fabrication begins. Although this fabrication is painfully real and thoroughly true.

Video embed

Bread and Salt I Official trailer I Chleb i sól I Oficjalny zwiastun

Kocur invites us on a tour of a small-town neighbourhood of blocks of flats. Here, a young student smokes joints with his old buddies, hangs out with them in a local kebab shack, and in the evenings wanders around town in the company of a beautiful childhood friend (the phenomenal Nikola Raczko). However, the idyllic atmosphere does not last long – as time passes, tension between the local boys and the immigrants running the kebab stall escalates, and Tymek has to take sides.

Damian Kocur’s cinema is governed by two elements: truth and tenderness. The director of Bread and Salt builds cinematic worlds from small observations and seemingly banal details. Bark sheets on an old sofa, a small parakeet flying around the house, an out-of-tune piano in a teacher’s flat and a housing estate football pitch, where a ten-year-old boy raps about informants and learning street life. This world really exists, in our neighbourhoods, in nearby towns.

Looking at the characters in Kocur, we recognise real people in them. The kind we pass on the street, who live next door to us, sometimes very close to us. We know them, the director knows them, too. That is why he lets them speak in their own words, hesitate, stammer, lose the rhythm of the phrase. He treats the script text only as a starting point, a frame on which he builds a new story. This is how screen truth is born.

But there is also tenderness. The tenderness of looking, of understanding. Kocur takes us to a provincial block of flats, but here he does not act like an anthropologist guide who wants to introduce us to the customs of the wild. No – the director of Bread and Salt invites us to meet his friends, perhaps present or former. He does not censor them, he does not judge them. Without a shadow of superiority, he shows the guys who have stayed in the hood and will probably never leave it, and those who still dream that they will be able to break away to a better world any moment. Thanks to the tenderness with which the director treats his protagonists, we can sympathise with the tears of the chav, who reminisces about his alcoholic father, and we can empathise with the physical fear of his coke-addled friend who cannot control his aggression.

Bread and Salt is a film about the end of a world. The small, private kind. Looking at a few weeks of Tymek’s film life, we are aware of the fleeting nature of the moment. This is his last summer in this place, in this town, in this company. Never again will the kebab be so salty, the sun never again so scorching, and his childhood friend never again so flirtatious and beautiful. Tymek no longer fits in here. When the holidays are over, he will leave. And most likely never return.

And here we arrive at what defines the young director’s artistic greatness – the ability to speak without words. For Kocur is a master of understatement. He talks about identity and mismatch, but you won’t find great dialogues and dramatic declarations in his film. He creates a gay melodrama where no one talks about their sexual orientation and where no multicoloured flag flutters. Because Kocur is not interested in carrying flags but in the truth of feelings and emotions. He speaks in whispers and can encapsulate the most intimate content in a single glance.

Kocur’s poetic story remains at the same time a powerful portrait of a xenophobic and racist Poland. In it, Kocur tells of the rejection of otherness but also of passive acquiescence to aggression and violence. There is a wonderful scene in Bread and Salt in which the young protagonist and his friend are riding a bus while behind their backs two chavs gang up on an Arab immigrant (Nadim Suleiman). Encouraged by the passivity of their fellow passengers, they become more aggressive by the second. Tymek does not react. He is afraid, perhaps ashamed. He keeps his head down. We understand his reaction perfectly. Because the director in this scene makes us hostage to our own fear, and the shame we feel at the passivity of our fellow passengers becomes our own shame.

For in Bread and Salt, Kocur touches on the phenomenon of the flock, showing how being part of a tribe kills empathy and restricts the reflexes of the heart (which he spoke about in the similar Beyond Is the Day). Inspired by the tragic story of a murder that took place in Ełk a few years previously, Kocur tells the story of violence that builds up, swells to finally explode uncontrollably. And although the final sequence of the film seems overly literal, this does not change the fact that Bread and Salt is a penetrating and extremely moving picture, a trace of talent that we rarely see on Polish screens today.

Bread and Salt. Polish title: Chleb i sól. Written and directed by Damian Kocur. Cinematography: Tomasz Woźniczka. Scenography: Ewa Mroczkowska. Editing: Alan Zejer. Starring: Tymoteusz Bies, Jacek Bies, Nikola Raczko, Dawid Piejko, Nadim Sulejman.

film Festival in Gdynia

munk studio