PROGRAMME ALFIERI WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 4th
3 pm
Happy End
by Marcel Łoziński, Paweł Kedzierski
Poland, 1972, 16’, o.v. Ita. sub. / Eng. sub.
A crowded room. What looked like a works council later takes on the overtones of a union meeting and at last those of a jury trial. M. Łozinski exploited the device of psychodrama weaving in the film some fine, profound criticism of the dictatorship of bureaucracy and of a system – the People’s Republic of Poland – that turns representation into a tool for supremacy and control.
Front Collision
by Marcel Łoziński
Poland, 1975, 11’, o.v. Ita. sub. / Eng. sub.
Marian Cudny is a retired railway worker. He had an exemplary career, rich in commendations and praises. Only at the end, six months before retiring, he was responsible for a railway accident. Therefore, the official end-of-career celebrations were cancelled. A documentary film open to embrace aesthetic and narrative practices and forms coming from fiction.
Practice Exercises
by Marcel Łoziński
Poland, 1984, 12’, o.v. Ita. sub. / Eng. sub.
As if they were doing a film exercise, a crew of young filmmakers walks down the streets of Warsaw and realizes a few interviews. The film shows a first set of interviews the way they were actually realised. A second set is shown but the people is now answering in the opposite way as they did earlier. A second version of the “document” is thus presented that reverses the first. Partly essay, partly punk experiment, partly comic sketch, this film should be viewed in the context of the crucial, wild decade of the 80’s in Poland.
My Place
by Marcel Łoziński
Poland, 1985, 14’, o.v. Ita. sub. / Eng. sub.
The camera follows the employees in a big hotel. M. Łozinski dismantles the hotel’s huge production process, bit by bit, shooting from the boiler room up to the manager’s office, including the kitchens, the laundry room, the cloakroom, and the guest rooms. The stoker fuelling the boiler, the scullion, the cook, the barmaid, the doorkeeper, and the hotel manager, everyone belongs in this small, tidy universe. Everyone is tied to the same, primeval condition of existence: working.
4:30 pm
Sławomir Mrozek Presents
by Paweł Łoziński
Poland, 1997, 48’, o.v. Ita. sub. / Eng. sub.
An important Polish writer, playwright, and caricaturist has taken refuge in Mexico for a few years to escape family, the State, success, and ultimately himself. The film-maker decided to film the moment when the writer is about to come back to his Motherland. The occasion will turn into a psychological portrait of an intellectual who has witnessed the most important changes in Poland over the past 30 years.
Between the Doors
by Paweł Łoziński
Poland, 2004, 25’, o.v. Ita. sub. / Eng. sub.
Episode of the collective project Über die Grenze (Across the Border), the film takes place at the border between Germany and Poland, that during different historical periods was a place of conflict and strife. Forced by the Russians to leave their home to go into what was once part of the German territory, the inhabitants have made of this suspended life a shared memory. In a landscape of great beauty and poetry, this memory emerges thanks to the memories that the protagonists tell the filmmaker.
Structure
by Paweł Łoziński
Poland, 1989, 6’, o.v. Ita. sub. / Eng. sub.
The protagonist is a man devoted to the care and maintenance of a “structure”, i.e., the penitentiary he directs but also the system of power in which he’s set as well as its scaffold – a system of thought and of values. He is a man who is concerned with maintaining order and conventions, the most important factor of social cohesion. No “j’accuse” to be found in this film, no moral, just an incredible capacity of perceiving the machinery of power and structure at work in an individual.
6:30 pm
Abu Haraz
by Maciej J. Drygas
Poland, 2013, 74’, o.v. Ita. sub. / Eng. sub.
Abu Haraz is a small village on the banks of the Nile, in Northern Sudan. The flooding of the river and seasons of the year mark the life rhythm of its society. Although the village seems materialistically deprived, it’s rich with the colours of life, laughter and family warmth. The construction of a gigantic dam on the Nile put at risk the ancient, natural pattern of people’s lives.
8:30 pm
Aishiteru My Love
by Stefano Cattini
Italy, 2013, 75’, o.v. Eng. sub.
The staging of a play at the end of the school year is the engine that triggers the dynamics of a group of students in a vocational school. The filmmaker, without assigning any definition to the word adolescence, relies on a intense and delicate story and avoid the explicit language, finding a deeper and more authentic texture of reality.
With the director in-person
Watch the trailer
10:15 pm
A Hundred Years of Cinema
by Paweł Łoziński
Poland, 1995, 62’, o.v. Ita. sub. / Eng. sub.
One hundred years of Polish film history from the point of view of those who were there as viewers. An ideal intimate journal under cinematic form that overlooks official history and celebrities, and focuses on history as participation, in terms of memories and emotions. The result is an absorbing work filled with curiosities that explores how film contributes to build collective identity and memory.