Film Archive

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15 Corners of the World

Documentary Film
Germany,
Poland
2014
75 minutes
Subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
Marta Golba, Erik Winker
Director
Zuzanna Solakiewicz
Music
Eugeniusz Rudnik
Cinematographer
Zvika Gregory Portnoy
Editor
Mateusz Romaszkan
Script
Zuzanna Solakiewicz
Sound
Marcin Lenarczyk
“Digital is better” – nowadays this title of a 90s track by the German band Tocotronic is a popular phrase we use without thinking. It’s a good thing then that our memories of the unique opportunities offered by analogue technology are now impressively revived by this film, which imaginatively demonstrates what spaces are disappearing in the wake of its loss. Its audiovisual journey starts at Polish Radio’s legendary experimental studio, which in the 1960s saw science fiction sounds created in a sound lab that looked like a spaceship’s control room. The head-strong composer Eugeniusz Rudnik, a former pioneer of electroacoustic music, is still working obsessively at his analogue editing station, trying to create unknown sound spheres in order to learn more about human nature. A discarded piece of tape, a voice, a stone, anything can become the basic material of a composition. Even a house – pending proof.

This tongue-in-cheek portrait of the artist as a sound tinkerer invites us on a visual expedition into his sound worlds. The camera, too, takes experimental choices, translates the acoustic dimensions into architecture, dance or landscapes, offers multiple interpretations and creates a synaesthetic experience for the big screen. No need to add that the film is also an ode to the analogue age.

Lars Meyer

6 Degrees

Documentary Film
Poland
2013
84 minutes
Subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
Anna Wydra, Izabela Łopuch, Tomasz Tokarski
Director
Bartosz Dombrowski
Cinematographer
Wojtek Zieliński
Editor
Izabela Pająk, Mateusz Romaszkan
Script
Bartosz Dombrowski
Sound
Błażej Kafarski
The world is full of secrets. Or did you know the theory that says that every human being on earth is connected to every other human being by six degrees of separation? But why theory? Bartosz Dombrowski puts it to the test and invites the audience on a very special kind of road movie: getting from a randomly chosen female punk musician in Warsaw to a randomly chosen Mexican peasant via a maximum of six contacts. How this works? The musician sends the crew to a punk veteran in London, who sends them to a family therapist in Miami, who knows the campaign manager of a Mexican presidential candidate in Mexico City etc. Every contact reduces the distance to Marco, the Mexican peasant and goal of all efforts. But this story would be no more than an entertaining global treasure hunt if the director did not use the superficial search as an entry point into the various lives and stories of his random protagonists. This level has a surprising effect: we discover ourselves. These people could be living in my town. Their experiences and stories are familiar, since they are based on a universal cultural code that connects us all as brothers and sisters.

Matthias Heeder

A Diary of a Journey

Documentary Film
Poland
2013
52 minutes
Subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
Anna Gawlita
Director
Piotr Stasik
Music
Motion Trio
Cinematographer
Piotr Stasik, Tomasz Wolski
Editor
Piotr Stasik, Tomasz Wolski
Tadeusz has devoted his life to photography, especially photo reportages. Now he has grown old and passes on his art to Michal, a highly motivated 15-year-old. They go on a trip together, travelling through Polish villages in their van with the built-in dark chamber, portraying the people they meet. Their black-and-white photos add up to a visual travel diary. Piotr Stasik has found his own poetic way of capturing the work of Tadeusz Rolke, who used to work for “Spiegel” and “Stern”: as a documentary road movie that also seems to be a trip through time. From the start this enterprise radiates an old-fashioned quality. And this is not just about the good old analogue image. When the developed photos are strung across the empty market square on a clothesline, they enable simple encounters that could never happen on Facebook. But it’s the encounter between old and young that’s at the centre here. The master and his pupil form an unconventional team whose roles are occasionally reversed. What Tadeusz missed in life, Michal still has a chance to catch up on. And so this film ultimately tells the story of a journey through life. No lack of big issues here, but the light touch with which they are compiled really makes the difference. While the magic of a summer is superimposed over everything.

Lars Meyer

Brothers

Documentary Film
Poland
2015
68 minutes
Subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
Małgorzata Staroń
Director
Wojciech Staroń
Cinematographer
Wojciech Staroń
Editor
Zbigniew Osiński, Wojciech Staroń
Script
Wojciech Staroń
The first sentences are still spoken in Russian. Then the brothers Mieczysław and Alfons find their Polish tongue again. They are back in their native country of Masuria, 70 years after being sent to exile in Siberia. But apart from the language they might as well still be in Siberia or Kazakhstan. The stations of their lives have gradually lost their time and place over the years, as scenes from their own home movies, yellowed traces of memories, suggest.

Director and cinematographer Wojciech Staroń accompanies the brothers on the last stage of their shared life, doles out their minor verbal tiffs and searches for the intimate moments that show wordlessly that they always depended on each other. One brother paints, the other holds the ladder, though it may cost his last ounce of strength. Staroń’s camera unerringly captures the symbolic images that reflect the brothers’ lives together. Two tractors chasing each other on the horizon. Two jetties on a lake, one of them a little more decrepit than the other. Two trees on a snow covered field, the one farther out hardly visible. At the same time he manages to re-translate Alfons’s mystical nature paintings into the present day, in which the brothers face a very real farewell. A poetical look back at a shared life.

Lars Meyer



Golden Dove in the International Competition 2015 and Award winner of the Prize of the Ecomenical Jury 2015

Communion

Documentary Film
Poland
2016
72 minutes
Subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
Anna Wydra, Anna Zamecka, Zuzanna Król, Hanka Kastelicova, Izabela Łopuch
Director
Anna Zamecka
Cinematographer
Małgorzata Szyłak
Editor
Agnieszka Glińska, Anna Zamecka, Wojciech Janas
Script
Anna Zamecka
Sound
Marcin Kasiński, Marcin Lenarczyk, Anna Rok, Katarzyna Szczerba
Ola is an ordinary girl who longs for a stable home. But the small world she is doing everything in her power to preserve is still a house of cards. At the age of 14 she has already assumed the role of her absent mother, raising her autistic brother Nikodem and calling her father on the phone to stop him from boozing in the pub. The three of them live at close quarters between ancient patterned wallpaper. When the washing machine enters the spin cycle, they have to steady the rickety furniture.
Still Ola keeps hoping that her real mother will return.

The film revolves around Nikodem’s upcoming First Communion. Religious lessons are one of the last fixed points here in provincial Poland, even if they obviously fail to deal with the real problems. As Ola prepares her brother for this day, painting the blackest scenarios in case he should fail ( for sin is lurking everywhere), the intense and emotional relationship between two youngsters on their own unfolds in front of the camera. This includes Ola’s temper tantrums and her short moments of happiness as well as Nikodem’s almost anarchic misbehaviour and his near-continuous stream of fragmented sentences that sound like higher wisdom. The two teenagers oppose reality, which leaves them almost no room to breathe and is captured with distressing immediacy, with all their vitality.

Lars Meyer



Young Eyes Film Award 2016

Deep Love

Documentary Film
Poland
2013
84 minutes
Subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
Marta Łachacz (Cor Leonis Production), Anna Wydra (Otter Films)
Director
Jan P. Matuszyński
Music
Atanas Valkov
Cinematographer
Kacper Fertacz
Editor
Przemysław Chruścielewski
Script
Jan P. Matuszyński
Sound
Marcin Lenarczyk, Franciszek Kozłowski
A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. And if he’s got to go down 100 metres, 98 metres will just not do. Janusz is the embodiment of the type of man who must run his head against a wall to live his passion, even at the risk of death. Even a stroke three years ago does not prevent him from preparing for the next challenge. On the contrary, he and his diving partner are toying with the dangerous idea that he might be able to return to his old life underwater: getting back control of his body mechanics and language. This alone might be enough for the story of an incorrigible extreme athlete. But the real drama is not enacted by Janusz, but by his girlfriend Joanna. As a diving therapist she understands, as a girlfriend she is afraid for him. She fights him for every metreof depth. It is a desperate struggle for responsibility, moderation, a love that can be lived. This film could be viewed from many angles. You could see Janusz as a typical male adventurer, or an egotist – or as someone who has become a projection surface for the people around him because he cannot express his thoughts any more. Maybe it’s not him, but the group of experts around him who want to prove something. Only one thing becomes increasingly clear: the whole burden is left to be carried by the women. Where are their limits?

Lars Meyer

Entangled

Documentary Film
Poland
2012
51 minutes
Subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
Maciej Kubicki, Anna Kępińska (Telemark)
Director
Lidia Duda
Music
Bartosz Straburzyński
Cinematographer
Wojciech Staroń
Editor
Agnieszka Bojanowska, Jakub Śladkowski
Script
Lidia Duda
Maciek was one of several children sexually abused by a neighbour. Robert was sent to prison, but when he is released everything starts again. Maciek decides to put an end to it and is now doing time for attempted murder in a young offender institution. Robert, who grew up in a children’s home where he was abused himself, lives with his old aunt, whose window panes are smashed regularly. He has been seen with children again …

Lidia Duda tells the story of a continuing crime, of guilt and atonement, in a matter-of-fact tone that steers clear of false emotions, judgements or excuses. The men calmly tell their tales from off-screen, interrupted by short scenes of everyday life, relatives’ stories or letters. The rapid montage keeps switching between perspectives as the biographies of victim and offender become increasingly entangled. The images by Wojciech Staroń, a multiple award-winner at Leipzig, speak for themselves: often cropped, rarely forming a whole, resting on details or observing from the background, seemingly detached. Only the images of the place where everything is happening suggest some degree of normality. But that’s hard to believe in a society which leaves victims and offenders to their own devices and in which taking the law into one’s own hands seems the only moral resort. The people are trapped by walls of fear, helplessness and hatred. Cold, claustrophobic and inexorable.

Grit Lemke

Father and Son

Documentary Film
Poland
2013
54 minutes
Subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
Paweł Łoziński
Director
Paweł Łoziński
Cinematographer
Paweł Łoziński, Marcel Łoziński
Editor
Przemysław Chruścielewski
By the time they’re 15 most people don’t travel with their parents any more. If they do, they have good reasons. Especially when one’s father is one of the most important Polish documentary film directors, whose open, invasive style initiated a school of its own, influenced generations of filmmakers and threw a large shadow over the son’s artistic practice (both are Leipzig award winners, by the way).

Paweł Łozinski invites Marcel, Łozinski senior, to an undertaking in the spirit of his father’s documentary method – provoking reality and seeing what happens: to take a trip West in a minivan, from their Polish home to the French roots of his Jewish father. The route alone is full of snares. And so their conversations go back not just to Paweł’s childhood, which he considers a failed experiment in anti-authoritarian ’68 education, but to the preceding generation, the Résistance and the Holocaust. As they ceaselessly polish glasses and windowpanes at rest areas and camping grounds, they struggle for clarity in their dialogues, too: about family, love, old age, traumata, responsibility, and forgiveness. Some questions remain open. But it’s clear that the shared journey leads to new places when parents grow old. The story of father and son has no happy end. But it is full of moments like the one when the father calls his ice cream-eating son “my little boy”. You can’t ask for more than that.

Grit Lemke

Intensity of Watching

Documentary Film
Poland
2016
67 minutes
Subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
Andrzej Sapija
Director
Andrzej Sapija
Music
Andrzej Dudek-Dürer
Cinematographer
Andrzej Sapija
Editor
Andrzej Sapija
Reality can only be represented in fragments, but fragments can reveal its essence. Everything depends on the intensity of the look, says the father of the Polish school of documentary film, Kazimierz Karabasz. One of his many students, Andrzej Sapija, takes what may be the last opportunity to film the man himself, 86 years old today; to unfurl his life and work – inseparable from each other – in fragments.

Karabasz the man does not look like a living legend; he’s still going to school. Quite recently he eagerly tested his new digital camera and pointed it at key companions like Jan Łomnicki. These images are also incorporated in Sapija’s film which may with some justification be called a mediated master class. Excerpts from Karabasz’s major works provide a chronological guideline through the history of film. Karabasz is the pioneer of a creative school of thought which liberated documentary film from the shadow of the weekly newsreel and from pre-cut ideological statements. The collective is replaced by the individual, the event by everyday life. Reality meets its poetic elevation. Today, Karabasz’s point of view is more important than ever. Because it’s careful observation above all that helps us against the unfiltered images from all over the world.

Lars Meyer

One Man Show

Documentary Film
Poland
2014
53 minutes
Subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
Maciej Kubicki
Director
Jakub Piątek
Cinematographer
Michał Stajniak
Editor
Urszula Klimek-Piątek, Jakub Piątek
Script
Jakub Piątek
Marcin Sitek is 33, an actor, well-trained, talented, highly motivated and good looking. He’s ready for his life to start. Or at least his career, at least a small part, that one scene. Instead he’s on the phone until he’s blue in the face, laughs on command at television casting shows, plays tiny roles in C-movies, makes bad jokes as a stand-up comedian on backstreet stages, strips in dubious establishments and earns his money abroad as a seasonal farm labourer.

Jakub Piątek follows his protagonist over the course of a year. A year of big plans and expectations which still ends on a Norwegian field again. And because Marcin is constantly staging himself and his life, the story is embedded in a studio plot: the great solo scene, the radiant hero’s one man show, though his mask gradually crumbles in the spotlight and under the merciless questions and commands of an off-screen voice until he ends up standing naked in front of us, bereft of every cool attitude.

Piątek uses a really innovative dramaturgy to paint the both impressive and bittersweet portrait of the generation “Y”, “internship” or “something in the media” – who hold it all in their hands and still fail.

Grit Lemke

Shoulder the Lion

Documentary Film
Ireland,
Poland,
USA
2015
74 minutes
Subtitles: 
No

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
Erinnisse Rebisz, Patryk Rebisz
Director
Erinnisse Rebisz, Patryk Rebisz
Music
Graham Sharpe, Colin Stetson, The Eskies
Cinematographer
Patryk Rebisz
Editor
Erinnisse Rebisz
Sound
Keller McDivitt
Humans can close their eyes but never their auditory canal. This simple fact signals the end of musician Graham’s career: an incessant pathological noise has invaded his head. Alice, the photographer, goes blind because of a retina disease. And Katie, the third protagonist in this astonishing film about the human spirit’s power of resistance, is beaten into a coma in her first professional boxing match, from which she awakes weeks later without a memory (adapted for the screen in “Million Dollar Baby”). Reset!

A powerful visual journey into the interior worlds of people forced to cope with extreme loss of senses. The co-directors Erinnisse and Patryk Rebisz rely on visually stylised depictions of the senses to give every drama its corresponding imagery. Blind Alice continues to work with the camera, the memory chip of her brain supplying experiential values for the new photos. In contrast, the ex-boxer’s brain keeps producing new, unfamiliar images that ultimately lead her to painting. And Graham, whose band was his life, re-invents himself, though without expectations, as the stage manager of a music festival. This boldly narrated and visually unusual film concludes in admiration for our species’ ability to transform personal crises into insights and new beginnings – at least sometimes.

Matthias Heeder

Two Worlds

Documentary Film
Poland
2016
51 minutes
Subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
Jacek Kucharski
Director
Maciej Adamek
Cinematographer
Mateusz Skalski
Editor
Sławomir Goździk
Script
Maciej Adamek
Sound
Mariusz Bielecki, Przemysław Jaworski
A film about an ordinary family: they ride bicycles, need a credit, buy a smartphone. No, something is different. The parents are deaf and their twelve-year-old daughter must translate from sign language. They are a great team – against all odds! The astonished looks of the smartphone sales assistant can’t hurt them.

Director Maciej Adamek delivers an amazingly light tale of the difficulties of existence. The slogans of inclusion and exclusion are re-translated into everyday stories which make us experience how the small collective master their life. He pulled off a rare feat here, as a close observer who manages to transcend his subject in every scene: who’s learning from whom? Maybe the parents are happier because they don’t know everything. And is it easier for their adolescent daughter to keep her secrets? Doesn’t this constellation remind us of migrant families, the director comments on his film, in which children learn the language sooner than their parents – and relationships are reversed? We certainly live not only in two worlds, but in many.

Cornelia Klauß

Wajda School Screening: Wróblewski According to Wajda

Documentary Film
Poland
2015
42 minutes
Subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
Adam Mickiewicz Institute
Director
Andrzej Wajda
Cinematographer
Jerzy Rudziński
Script
Andrzej Wajda, Marek Brodzki
In Wajda’s story, Andrzej Wróblewski is shown as one of the greatest painters of the 20th century and a man tragically marked by war.

In the documentary Wróblewski według Wajdy / Wróblewski according to Wajda, realized by Andrzej Wajda in 2015, the director recalls Wróblewski as a painter and as a friend. He speaks of a man who faced the challenges of his time and searched for his own place. Wróblewski, seen with Wajda’s eyes, is a genius, who had to wait for recognition for a long time, but who hadn’t recognized his genius himself.

Their paths crossed right after the war, when they both studied at the Fine Arts Academy in Kraków. The artist was born in Vilnius, studied at the faculty of painting and sculpture, and also history of art at the Jagiellonian University.