Category: films completed

A group of young men gives up on their existing lives and enters the Dominican Novitiate. Novices learn their duties, but more importantly, they form new friendships. They start to open up and confess to each other. They share their doubts about their faith in God and wonder whether the convent is the way they should follow. They miss their families and friends. They miss sexual contacts.

„The Novice” is a story about the search for life’s purpose. It is also a story about giving up on a path that seemed to be leading to it.

Simone, Francesca, and Olivia are young members of the Communist Refoundation Party. Despite different personalities and backgrounds, they participate in demonstrations, meetings, and support each other.
They search for ways to organize the world, find work, and help them feel like a part of a community. However, senior Party members are only concerned with the past, sabotaging any attempts to change.

Their disenchantment with the Party coincides with personal crises. From one side Simone’s sense of helplessness and the death of his mother, and Francesca’s family problems from the other side make them drift away from the organization and each other. Olivia, impatient with her colleagues’ inertia, joins a left-wing militia. Soon she finds out she got involved with dangerous people.

Months into an unprecedented war raging just across the European Union border, filmmakers Piotr Pawlus and Tomasz Wolski journey deep into the shelled-out state, in the hope of capturing “the new normal” of the Ukrainian people.

The film had its world premiere at the Berlinale Forum – Berlinale International Film Festival.

An unsual couple, Leszek and Mikolaj, move into a stud farm that one of them inherited form his father. When Mikolaj discovers that someone has destroyed their wooden fence, he becomes obsessed with fixing it. Yet, can the fence really protect this relationship from a hostile enivornment?

The story depicts the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Vaclav Vojir and Vera Vojirova, their family and their immediate surroundings between the summer of 1968 and the summer of 1969.

The couple gave their “word” to each other that they would always stand by themselves and not cross their moral boundaries. However, the period around 1968 exposes their mutual promise to difficult tests.

Is the plane a symbol of modernity and freedom, or rather catastrophes, assassinations and deep political divisions? In the Polish pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, the artist Roman Stańczak literally turns the luxury jet over to the other side, looking for a universal gesture. Registration of the creative process is the starting point for a story about the dramatic fate of the artist who, after many years of life exclusion and non-existence in the world of art, returned to activity, almost immediately realizing the sculpture on the most important artistic event in the world.

When protests broke out in Communist Poland in late 1970, a crisis team gathered in Warsaw. Soon after the militia made use of their batons. Shots were fired. Through archival recordings and animations, viewers are able to observe various power mechanisms. The film “1970” is a story about a rebellion but told from the perspective of the oppressors.

A polyphonic hymn to rural women. A celebration of mature women, who are physically and spiritually connected with the land and united in their singing. Traditional songs performed with passion are juxtaposed with untamed nature. Raw, authentic music expresses strength, a community of women, and an exchange of life experiences. A vibrant, living tradition that stems from mutual learning.

An artistic commune is working on a film about Rosa Luxemburg, but the mysterious Director disappears as they set out to start filming.

Although the crew are fascinated by the Director, they also loathe him. The question is – where has he gone and who really is the man, who has so strongly influenced the life of this community?

The dynamics of relationships between people living in an artistic and emotional symbiosis turns out to be equally explosive and toxic. The film was inspired by an artistic group led by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Krystian Lupa – a controversial and probably the most outstanding living Polish theater director of internationally recognized plays. His accolades include the Europe Theater Prize, the Nestroy-Theaterpreis, he has also been awarded with the French Order of Arts and Letters.

“Let’s try to jump into the well” is a road movie that has only one location – the stage. Whether it presents a road to failure or success is irrelevant. The audience can watch the rehearsals for Kafka’s “The Trial”. They can observe the creative process – often ambiguous, sometimes incomprehensible. A process we have to judge for ourselves.

Lupa invites his actors to jump with him “into a well”, at the bottom of which no revelation awaits.