August Zamoyski: Polish aristocrat who abandoned his family fortune to pursue the dream of becoming an artist. Often compared to Michelangelo, amazing sculptor, outstanding athlete, amateur filmmaker, avant-garde dancer, collector of fancy cars, teacher but also a scandalist who got married four times. His life story, full of sudden twists and turns, was a movie script waiting to happen.
Seven women – from a girl to a mature woman. Together they look for the boundaries of sisterhood. A generation gap between them is their challenge. They work on a choreography they call the “Collective Body”, “The Rock”. A film inspired by K. Kieślowski’s work “7 Women of Different Ages”.
NOLANDIA is a bold portrait of contemporary Poland from the perspective of a young generation reckoning with Poland’s role in the Holocaust. This feature-length documentary takes the viewer on a stranger-than-fiction journey through today’s Poland, where stories of friendships, first loves, and mundane jobs unfold on or around former sites of horror.
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 observational thriller based on the true story of Viktor Kalivoda – the Czech serial killer dubbed the ‘Forest Killer’ by the media. In an attempt to unravel the mystery of the motive behind Kalivoda’s crimes, we follow his story over the course of a year from the moment he won the ‘Millionaires’ programme, through his preparations for committing the murders, his trial, to his suicide in prison.
Isabella Flore is 91 years old and has an explosive temperament. She is a deeply religious catholic and a fortune teller. She is also the only inhabitant of a Sardinian village next to what was once the world’s largest river dam. Today, the dam is in danger of collapse and the village stands abandoned.
Isabella is often visited by people who look for her prophecies. But whoever arrives expecting a quiet old lady blinks their eyes in astonishment. She is despotic, loses patience easily and has a bawdy sense of humor.
But despite her strong character, she grows weaker. When the guests leave, she puts on her oxygen mask and breathes heavily. Isabella has one dream. Before she dies, she wants to renovate the abandoned village.
She crosses out successive lottery tickets and writes letters to the authorities asking them for action. There is not much time left. According to her own prediction, she will die in 2 years. She does everything to save the memory of the village and of herself.
The film „You have to go, the others stay” is to be centered on death, loss and the need for inventing new traditions to help overcome grief. It will feature a group of people, whose personal experience will serve as a point of departure for describing the world of lack after the death of a loved one.
At the basic level, the film will feature meetings, so called dinners of death. This initiative brings together strangers who all experienced loss, discussing the topic of death at the dinner table. Free of social convention, their conversations are full of grief, anger and laughter, giving a new perspective on bereavement. Our guides in this world will be Anja Franczak, the only licensed death doula in Poland.
On a deeper level the film conveys the need for constructing new funerary traditions, as the previous ones have proven dated and ineffective. I would like to show these new rituals as psychological tools that the protagonists use to survive the loss of a loved one. The structure and narrative are intended to follow the group process, without resorting to interviews.
On a third level the film aims to show the burial ceremony as a ritual that requires transformation.
Our guide in the world of funerary rites will be Jan Möller, founder of the Center for Funerary Culture and Education in Berlin, a pioneer in discourse of death.
I wish to create a multi-faceted film portraying the process of reclaiming the subject of death in modern culture.
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.
A seemingly normal afternoon in the city gets disrupted as passers-by are temporarily unhinged from their daily business. A man lying on the pavement becomes a problem not only for the local tenants, but also medical services and the police.