“Rhinoceros” by Sentsov and “Hamlet Syndrome” - in the Kino Polska series
In the main building of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in the Rose Cinema hall, from February 24 to March 2, a week of contemporary Polish films, Kino Polska, is taking place. It will begin with the Oscar-nominated film by the doyen of Polish cinema, Jerzy Skolimowski, IO, about the adventures of a donkey, and on the same evening will show the multi-award-winning English-language film based on real events by Agnieszka Smoszynska THE SILENT TWINS, about sisters June and Jennifer Gibbons, who refused to talk to the rest of the world, communicating only among themselves using a language only the two of them understood, because they were the only black children in the town where they grew up.
Until recently, Polish cinema spoke a lot and strongly about the past, ancient and recent. This time, only one of more than a dozen films at the festival talks about the past: the comedy Back Then about a family in socialist Poland in the 1980s who dreams of getting rich, buying a car and furniture, and going on vacation to Hungary. All the other films in the current series (and they were made in 2021-2022) are only about modernity, sometimes even, as in the film “Woman on the Move,” not even about Poland, but about America. The main genre is psychological dramas focused on family problems and the “search for oneself.” Like, for example, F*CKING BORNHOLM, where two families go to the Danish island of Bornholm to spend their holiday in a trailer park on the seashore, and almost immediately it becomes clear how much unspoken and painful has accumulated in the soul of the main character Maya, the mother of two young sons who become the cause of serious conflict. Another psychological drama - "WOMAN ON THE ROOF" - is endowed with a crime-detective element: the heroine robs a bank. But the essence is the same: a loveless marriage, everyday routine, depression and an attempt to find a way out.
The leading actress was awarded at the Tribeca Film Festival for Best Performance by an Actress. Most films are deliberately slow, with elements of surrealism, like Illusion, about a woman trying to unravel the reason for her daughter's disappearance and find both the killer and her daughter's body, or the better made Silent Land. A beautiful, prosperous, taciturn Polish couple rented a small villa on an Italian island. With swimming pool and sea view. The pool doesn’t work (later we find out that there are problems with water on the island and the owner doesn’t really want the pool to work), but they insist. The worker, a young Arab, puts everything in order, but drowns in a pool filled with water. And the movie is slow
an atmosphere of tense anticipation, secrets and... guilt is being built up. Could they have saved him? Did you want to? In some remarks the theme of immigrants and strangers comes up.
This theme is explored even better and more dramatically in BREAD AND SALT, which is not only based on a true story, but also played only by non-professional actors.
The talented pianist Timosh (played by pianist Timosh Biz) comes home to
provincial town, on vacation. He studies at the Warsaw Conservatory and received a scholarship to study in Germany for two years. At home he is met by his brother Jacek, also a talented pianist (this role is played by Bis’s brother, Jacek), but who did not enter the conservatory and dropped out of classes... Drugs, alcohol, fights, rudeness, rudeness, childhood without parental participation... And two Arabs who opened a snack bar and became an object of curiosity and hatred.
Speaking about films based on real facts, one cannot fail to mention ALL OUR FEARS (Dir. Lukasz Gutt & Lukasz Ronduda) - “Fears”, where the young artist Daniel Rytsarsky tries to reconcile his and his fellow countrymen’s violent Catholicism and his own homosexuality. The film won the Golden Lion for Best Film at the Gdynia Film Festival, and together with the other films in the series, it provides a fairly comprehensive portrait of today's Polish society and the real-life problems it faces. Two films in the program were made jointly with Ukrainian filmmakers, are shown in Ukrainian and partially Russian and are directly related to Ukraine. This is Oleg Sentsov’s film “Rhinoceros” (RHINO) - about the Ukrainian 90s and a hero who loses all sensitivity to other people’s pain, climbing up the gangster hierarchy, and in fact trying to survive in a thoroughly corrupt world (Sentsov began working on the film back in 2012 year, but was able to finish having already left the Russian camp), and the only documentary film of the festival - THE HAMLET SYNDROME, which was filmed before February 2022, although the war, as we know, was already underway and had a cruel impact on the fate of the five main characters of the film, gathered to create a performance on the theme of Hamlet's dilemma - “to be or not to be.” Details on the website BAM.org
Posted by Maya Pritzker
