The Last Spark of Hope

Arthur is not as nurturing as the android grandma in Ray Bradbury’s “I Sing the Body Electric!” Not even close. To be fair, that was never his intended function. He is a patrol robot, who was deployed during the “climate wars.” Those wars are over and everyone lost. After a little makeshift reprogramming, Eva’s now presumed dead father left Arthur to look after her. Unfortunately, Arthur is downright “robotic” when it comes to following his directives. Ironically, that endangers Eva in director-screenwriter Piotr Biedron’s The Last Spark of Hope, which releasees today on VOD.

Those who could, bugged out on spaceships bound for nowhere. Eva is relatively lucky among those who remained. Her mountain-top camp remains higher than he worst of the toxic atmosphere. Despite the risks, Eva most regularly ventures down in search of supplies. One day, she returns home after Arthur’s monthly password has already changed. Awkwardly, the password list is inside, but Arthur will not let her enter without the password. There is nothing funny about this Catch-22 for Eva, because without the water inside, she dies.

In a way, Last Spark is a very zeitgeisty film, but while most artificial intelligence thrillers worry about AI’s taking too much initiative, Arthur is dangerous because he is so blinkered by his rules and procedures. Arthur’s visual design is also quite shrewd. He looks like one of broken down robots the Jawas were hawking in the original Star Wars, but the obvious mileage makes his unreliableness quite believable.

Of course, some viewers might well ask how Eva could lose sight of something as important as her killer robot’s passwords. That is a very Gen-X attitude, reflecting an instinctive distrust of technology. Eva is several generations younger than Gen-Z. Presumably, she grew up with very different attitudes towards tech, despite witnessing the horrors of robotic war.

The Peasants, A Nobel Prize-Winner Animated

Most of these peasants are poor, but some are wealthy. In a few years, their many of their ilk would be dubbed “Kulaks” (with fatal results). Regardless, this early Nineteenth Century Polish village hangs together as a community, except when it turns on one of its own. Jagna Paczesiowna is too independently inclined to conform to the Lipce villagers’ prejudices in DK & Hugh Welchman’s extraordinary animated film, The Peasants, adapted from Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont’s Nobel Prize-winning novel, which opens tomorrow in New York.

Every single man in Lipce wants to “send vodka” to Jagna’s widowed mother Dominikowa, but she has no desire to surrender herself to a husband. Unfortunately, there is no refusing Marciej Boryna, a wealthy farmer, whose wife recently died. Their marriage is especially awkward for Jagna, because she was having an affair with Boryna’s married son and farm manager, Antek.

Of course, they continue carrying after the marriage—often a little too openly for her husband’s liking. This tension leads to greater feuds between father and son, resulting in the expulsion of Antek, his wife Hanka, and their children from the Boryna holdings. However, the old man is not unsympathetic towards Hanka and his grandchildren. In fact, he will make his daughter-in-law the new manager when tragedy the family.

Lipce might be a village Polish village just after the turn of the century, but the dynamics are the same as Peyton Place, accept maybe darker. This is Poland, so the arrival of Cossacks (at the behest of absentee landowners) is definitely bad news. The locals’ hidebound traditional ways can also manifest in harsh, almost pagan scapegoating rituals.

Yet, the film is absolutely gorgeous, visually. As with their previous feature, Loving Vincent, the Welchmans employ era-appropriate paintings as the basis for their animation, but they draw on multiple artists. Again, they also incorporate live-action performances, rendering them into animation, in what might be the classiest rotoscoping ever.

The tribulations rained down on Jagna can be a bit grim, but the film still offers much beauty. Frankly, the poetic transitions between seasons are works of art in and of themselves. The Welchmans’ adaptation also really stretches to end on a somewhat remotely positive note. They sort of pull it off, relying a great deal of ambiguity.

Pianoforte, on VOD

As tournaments go, the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw is arguably more physically and emotionally demanding than many Olympic events. In many cases, the young pianists probably have more talent. Jakub Piatek follows several young competitors performing under extreme pressure in the documentary Pianoforte, which releases tomorrow on VOD.

As the name suggests, there will be a lot of Chopin played during the multi-stage quinquennial competition. Polish competitor Marcin Wieczorek jokes that winners tend to look like the composer. If he is right, the Italian/Slovenian Alexander Gadjiev should be a favorite for the 2021 edition, which he probably is.

Gadjiev is also on friendly terms with fellow Italians Leonora Armellini and Michelle Candotti. Having a network to gripe and commiserate together seems to be an advantage for them. In contrast, Russian/Armenian Eva Gevorgyan appears to have the largest and most professional coaching contingent, but given their severity, they might be a mixed blessing for the seventeen-year-old, for whom anything less than victory will clearly be a disappointment.

At the end of the film, the closing captions inform us Gevorgyan has almost exclusively performed in Russian since the 2021 Chopin competition, because of Putin’s illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Arguably, the resulting damage to her young career makes her another victim of Putin’s lawlessness. Viewers will feel sympathy for her, but they will still root against her, hoping to see her nasty coaches lose.

Pianoforte is observational to a fault. There are no sit-down interviews or voice-over context. Piatek just lets us watch it all unfold, trusting viewers to pick up what we need as it proceeds. It mostly works.

EU Film Fest (Vancouver) ’23: Leave No Traces

In the West, we prosecute police brutality. In Communist nations, it was protected. Usually, it was part of a concerted campaign to harass and torture dissidents. In the case of Grzegorz Przemyk, it was force of habit, but the Communist Party reflexively shielded the perpetrators just the same. Years later, the trauma of the case still haunts Poland. Jan P. Matuszynski breaks down the Jaruzelski regime’s operation to discredit witnesses and compromise the investigation of Przemyk’s murder, step-by-agonizing-step, in Leave No Traces, which screens tomorrow as part of the European Union Film Festivalin Vancouver.

Przemyk and his friend Jurek Popiel (a composite) were celebrating their college entrance exams, when the local police arrested them, suspecting they were the scruffy Solidarity supporters they looked like (as indeed they were). Since Przemyk was the daughter of Barbara Sadowska, a poet and member of the Solidarity defense committee, he had a good idea of what his rights were, as a suspect under arrest. Tragically, asserting his rights prompts Przemyk’s fatal beating. Popiel witnessed it all, including the senior officer, who instructed the militia men to kick Przemyk in the stomach, so it would “leave no traces.”

Initially, cooler-headed apparatchiks like Kowalczyk, mindful of the Pope’s imminent visit, want to treat the matter like an isolated criminal matter. However, Kiszczak, the interior minister, insists on launching a full cover-up. As the disgusted chief prosecutor Fraciszek Rusak eventually notes, Kiszczak’s heavy-headed response, elevates the murder of Przemyk into an international incident. Although he dutifully prosecuted dissent during martial law, Rusak appoints a prosecutor consider sympathetic to the opposition, so Kiszczak will devise ways to undermine and replace her, while directly attacking Sadowska, Popiel, and his family.

Matuszynski has a background in documentary filmmaking that serves him well in Leave No Traces, but it never feels academic or scholarly. Instead, his meticulous recreation of the Party’s machinations builds into an extraordinary level of tension. Frankly, it is hard to even breathe during the two-and-a-half-hours-plus of Leave No Traces, because you can see how they deliberately and ruthlessly went about breaking people. It is chilling to watch.

This is a stunning indictment of a corrupt and oppressive regime, deeply rooted in a toxic ideology that had no value for the individual. The chief witness is probably Sandra Korzeniak, who is absolutely devastating as Sadowska, the heartbroken mother. This is not an obnoxiously flashy look-at-me-I’m-Meryl-Streep kind of performance. Instead, Korzeniak shows us how the Communist regime slowly hollowed out Sadowska inside and eventually killed her. It is a pity that Leave No Traces was not nominated for an international Oscar last year, but it is a sin that her performance has not had the recognition it deserves.

Szumowska’s Never Gonna Snow Again

Zhenia might be a superhero, or maybe a super-villain. He might have gained his powers through radiation, like Spiderman, but his point of contact was Pripyat (Chernobyl). His super-abilities are in his hands, but his intentions are not always clear. With ambiguous powers come ambiguous responsibilities in Malgorzata Szumowska’s Never Gonna Snow Again (“co-directed” by cinematographer-co-writer Michal Englert), which opens today in New York.

Sort of like Django dragging his coffin, Zhenia blew into town carrying his massage table over his shoulder. Thanks to his powers of mesmerism, the mysterious masseuse had no trouble with immigration. The next time we see him, Zhenia has built up a large client list in a gated community outside Warsaw. He seems to hold many of his clients in a seductive sway, especially the women (like a clean-cut version of Nick Nolte in Down and Out in Beverly Hills). Yet, he never takes advantage of them whenever puts them under via hypnotic suggestion. Instead, he might practice his ballet in their spacious McMansions.

NGSA is a strange film that generally feels like an art-house genre film, but it is tricky to define in what ways. Regardless, it is far and away Szumowska’s best film, head and shoulders superior to the dreary The Other Lamb or Elles.  There are periodic expressionistic excursions into Zhenia’s subconscious that start to try viewer patience, but Szumowska actually makes them payoff with a haunting climax.

Alec Utgoff’s weird lead performance well suits the film. He is like a human Rorschach. He gives so little, yet somehow invites those around him to infer and project so much. Weronika Rosati is also quite extraordinary, in a tightly-wound, yet understated way, as Wika, the wife of Zhenia’s cancer-stricken performance.

Still Life in Lodz

To most collectors, a still life by Tolpin, a virtually unknown Russian painter is a far cry from Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (the painting in Woman in Gold), but to Lilka Elbaum (born Rozenbaum), it holds similar significance. Her family reluctantly left it behind when they were forced to immigrate by the Communist regime’s anti-Semitic purges, but its history in Lodz’s traditional Jewish neighborhood extended back before them, to the 1920s. Documentarian Slawomir Grunberg uses the painting as a device to examine the history of Lodz’s Jewish community in Still Life in Lodz, which opens virtually this Friday.

Pola Erlich and her sons were the original tenants of Elbaum’s family flat and they first hung Tolpin’s still life, where it would remain for decades. The collaborating resident who took possession during the German occupation kept it up and so did the Rozenbaums when they moved in after the war. Although Elbaum was born post-War and eventually immigrated to America, she kept in touch with the daughter of the family that sheltered her mother, so from time to time, she returned to Poland.

As a result, Elbaum felt a diasporic kinship with American-born Paul Celler, whose mother, Rosa Posalska, survived the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz, as well as Roni Ben Ari, an Israeli artist, whose grandfather, Moshe Halpern, immigrated to Israel before the War. Elbaum and Grunberg accompany them as they explore their own family connections to the historic neighborhood specifically and to Poland in general.

Still Life might sound like a conventional documentary about the tragic Jewish Holocaust-era experience, but Grunberg finds ways to make it feel fresh, including incorporating brief but distinctive animated interludes. He also shoots some surprisingly cinematic aerial shots that give viewers a good sense of the geography and scale of the neighborhood.

Mariusz Wilczynski’s Kill It and Leave This Town

1970s Lodz was a perfectly representative city of Poland under Communism. It was industrial, depressed, and oppressively sinister. At least, that is how animator Mariusz Wilczynski, or his animated alter-ego remembers it. Time and events blend together as he delves into the nightmarish memories buried in his subconscious. Maybe this all happened him or maybe some of it happened to his family, but it all haunts him just the same throughout the darkly trippy Kill It and Leave This Town, which opens today via Anthology Film Archives’ virtual cinema.

Plenty of awful things happen in Kill, but its narrative remains elusive. There is a filmmaker, perhaps not unlike Wilczynski, who hopes to finally finish a long-in-the-works project, very much like the eleven-years-in-the-making Kill. He still visits his ailing mother in the hospital, even though he [presumably] had a very difficult childhood. Who didn’t, in this harsh world? Yet, probably the most harrowing recollections come from the old man with a bird-ish beak, with whom the filmmaker shares a train car.

If you are a sheltered waif, who is triggered by disturbed sights and sounds (such as crying children), you will have a hard time with this film. However, you will be missing out a distinctive and defiantly challenging animated feature, following squarely in the tradition of Jiri Barta. Aesthetically, the closest comparison for Wilczynski’s ultra-minimalist, hand-drawn animation might be Don Hertzfeldt crossed with David Lynch. To put it another way, he takes the grossest, most disturbing and psychologically expressive elements of Plympton and Gilliam—and scrapes away everything else.

On the surface level, Kill comes across as an apolitical film. Yet, just knowing this Hellscape is set during the Communist era is a devastating indictment. The damage done to the community and the individual psyche is profoundly and inescapably evident in every frame.

NYICFF ’19: Double Trouble

Pablo Picasso was so taken with Warsaw in 1948, he painted a very Picasso-like version the city’s mermaid symbol on a wall in a freshly constructed housing complex. Alas, the flat residents convinced the Communist Party philistines to let them paint over it in 1953. Poof, an original Picasso destroyed, except maybe not. The missing Picasso mural serves as the Macguffin in Marta Karwowska’s Double Trouble, which screens as part of the 2019 New York International Children’s Film Festival.

Old people are mean. That seems to be the takeaway from this film, but Julka really isn’t in a position to judge. She has never been particularly social herself. She was supposed to visit her mother and father in Canada during her boarding school’s summer vacation, but she is stuck cooling her heels at her not-so warm and welcoming Aunt’s Warsaw flat, until her parents can be bothered to arrange her tickets.

Initially, she doesn’t think much of Olek (and neither do we), but when thieves steal a set of rare architectural plans from her Aunt’s flat (it was sort of her fault), he is the only person available and willing to help her recover them. As they start nosing around, the kids discover the plans in question were for a now abandoned building that a gang of thieves has been tearing apart looking for a rather unusual treasure: the missing Picasso mermaid. Although presumed destroyed, Julka deduces her Aunt’s parents managed to save it, hiding it someplace in the building now scheduled for demolition.

Unfortunately, they are now in danger from the desperate gang of matronly biddies that have been ransacking the joint. To find the treasure, Julka and Olek (with his fuzzball doggie Meatball) will have to work together, but they are much more inclined to bicker, like a junior version of Tracy and Hepburn.

Double Trouble is a generally okay film, but it definitely skews towards a decidedly younger demographic. This is particularly true of the broad humor and the impossible-to-miss lessons to learn. Frankly, more mature viewers will be disappointed there is not considerably more exploration of the Picasso Mermaid’s backstory, because it is a clever use of some fascinating true-life cultural history.

Hanna Hryniewicka and Jakub Janota-Bzowski are perfectly fine as the two young busybodies, but they were clearly guided towards rather broad, unsubtle performances. That more or less goes for the adults as well. Double Trouble is the sort of film people think of when they hear a term like “children’s movie,” which is fine. However, NYICFF has a history of programming more sophisticated selections, such as Room 213, a ghost story produced for and starring kids that happens to be genuinely scary. Double Trouble cannot compare with it, but neither can 90% of the gory slashers released via VOD with little or no fanfare.

Technically, Double Trouble is quite an over-achiever. Cinematographer Kacper Fertacz and production designer Julia Junosza-Szaniawska make it much more atmospheric than it needs or arguably deserves to be. The older elementary school set should find it diverting, but Double Trouble will not make much impression on parents when it screens again tonight (3/3) and Saturday the 16^th, as part of this year’s NYICFF.

Submitted by Poland: Cold War

Death is not the natural enemy of love—ideology is. Academy Award-winning auteur Pawel Pawlikowski understands that better than anyone. He saw how exile, separation, and transience took a toll on his Polish defector parents, but it never quelled their mutual ardor. Their story inspired the perfectly yet tragically matched lovers in Pawlikowski’s Cold War (trailer here), Poland’s official foreign language Academy submission, which opens this Friday at Film Forum.

Neither Wiktor or Zula is all that interested in folk music, but they both see Mazurek, a traditional dance troupe, as a vehicle to help them get what they want. For the classically-trained, Western-influenced Wiktor, it is a chance to travel and possibly escape, whereas Zula merely sees it as a means of avoiding her abusive father. However, they share an immediate connection that only becomes more potent and passionate over time.

Right from the start, their romance is a rocky one, especially when Zula confesses she agreed to inform on Witkor as part of her terms of employment. Inevitably, they agree to defect one fateful night in pre-Wall East Berlin. However, Witkor slips across alone when Zula fails to met him at the designated time. By doing so, he becomes an enemy of the state, but that will not be enough to halt their romance.

Thus, begins a long, agonizing period of hasty meetings, unsatisfying encounters, assorted defections, and costly repatriations. Cold War is only a mere 89 minutes, but it tells an epic, decade-spanning story. Frankly, it could be considered a 21^st Century Doctor Zhivago, chronicling an intimate love story against the sweeping backdrop of historical chaos and oppression, but Pawlikowski does it all with elegant narrative economy—and jazz.

Music is important to this love story, starting with Mazurek’s choral performances, but fully blossoming with the hardbop-style jazz Witkor plays in Paris and the torchy LP he tries to produce for Zula. It all sounds perfectly era appropriate and in the case of the jazz, smoky and swinging, thanks to Marcin Masecki’s arrangements and piano stylings. It really helps us understand the depth of his feelings and the melancholy of his blues.

Tomasz Kot also seems very attuned to the music as he broods, yearns, and chafes under authority. As Wiktor, he raises world weariness to a high art form. The romantic rapport he forges with Joanna Kulig’s Zula is palpable and often quite painful to witness. Kulig melts microphones with her sultry vocals and rivets viewers with the sensitivity and brittleness of her performance. It is no exaggeration to say they represent one of the finest on-screen pairings of the post-millennium era.

The design team faithfully recreates the mean cruddiness of Communist Poland and East Berlin, but Lukasz Zal makes it all look strikingly beautiful with his award-worthy black-and-white cinematography. Every frame of every shot is truly a work of art. In terms of technical craftsmanship, Cold War could well be the strongest film of the year, but it also connects on a deeply emotional level.

There are many good reasons Cold War dominated the European Film Awards. It is easily the best looking and sounding narrative film of the year. In fact, it is the best of the year, even eclipsing Never Look Away. Very highly recommended, Cold War opens this Friday (12/21) in New York, at Film Forum.

PFF ’18: I’m a Killer

During the 1970s, miscarriages of justice were commonplace occurrences in Socialist Poland. However, the stakes were particularly high for the police detective who quite possibly railroaded a (maybe) innocent man for the crimes of “The Silesian Vampire,” Poland’s first recorded serial killer. Questions remain decades later, which Marciej Pieprzyca explores in his thinly fictionalized I’m a Killer (trailer here), a selection of the 2018 Polish Film Festival in Los Angeles.

Living in pre-Solidarity Poland was grim enough without a serial killer stalking women. Despite the taunting letters the murderer sent to the police, the authorities did not give the case priority, until he killed the niece of the local Communist Party boss—or so many locals believed.

Regardless, junior detective Janusz Jasinski is brought in to lead the reorganized investigation shortly after her death. Frankly, he suspects he is being set up to be a scapegoat and he is probably right, but his try-anything approach actually produces a very credible suspect: bitter, wife-beating laborer Wieslaw Kalicki (a fictional analog of Zdzislaw Marchwicki).

There are plenty of reasons to dislike Kalicki and a fair amount of circumstantial evidence, but nothing hard and physical ties him to the murders. Of course, Jasinski’s task force has more than enough to bring him to trial under the old Communist regime, but the man stubbornly refuses to confess. The brazen score-settling of the witnesses called against him also troubles Jasinski, but his future depends on Kalicki’s conviction. Nevertheless, he starts visiting Kalicki, partly to provide some assistance to his family and partly to win the accused man’s trust—for his own sake.

In some ways, I’m a Killer is like the true-crime series Netflix cranks out on a weekly basis, but the Communist era setting makes everything more dangerous and dysfunctional. Pieprzyca clearly has ideas regarding Kalikci/Marchwicki’s guilt or lack thereof, but there is absolutely no ambiguity in his portrayal of the Communist-era legal system. Through the initially well-intentioned Jasinski, we see how power begets corruption, which breeds the cowardice and moral turpitude that will allow a profound injustice to proceed to its tragic end.

Miroslaw Haniszewski is quite remarkable as Jasinski, convincingly sliding down his slippery slope character-development arc, from relatable everyman plugger to sociopathic stooge. It is also almost as harrowing to watch Arkadiusz Jakubik’s Kalicki crumble from a defiant proletarian with thuggish inclinations to a completely hollow and broken man.

This is probably the worst the 1970s ever looked on film, but everything about the production has a convincingly true-to-life, tactile feel, thanks to the excellent work of production/set designer Joanna Anastazja Wojcik, costume designer Agata Culak, and the rest of the design team. After spending time in this grim milieu, viewers should be ready to get down on their knees and give thanks for Solidarity, Reagan, and Pope John Paul II. Very highly recommended, I’m a Killer screens today (10/20) and Wednesday (10/24), as part of this year’s Polish Film Festival in LA.

Brooklyn Horror ’18: Tower. A Bright Day

There have been plenty of sisters in horror movies, such as The Shining, Twins of Evil, and A Tale of Two Sisters. Usually, it is immediately clear what we should make of them and their relationship (assuming that word still applies), but Mula and Kaja are something else entirely. There is no question their sibling ties have frayed, but just who we should sympathize with, if anyone at all, is hard to judge. Regardless, family is the ultimate horror show in Jagoda Szelc’s Tower. A Bright Day (trailer here), which screens tonight as a selection of the 2018 Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.

Kaja is a little off, but there are good reasons for her aloofness. After a long absence (obviously implied to be a term of institutionalization), Mula has allowed her to attend a family celebration. It will be the first communion of Nina, Kaja’s daughter, whom Mula and her husband have raised as their own. As part of the ground rules, Kaja must strictly preserve this secret. Nevertheless, her quick rapport with her biological daughter inevitably unnerves Mula.

Soon the responsible sister’s neuroses are bubbling over, but her family hardly notices. They are too distracted by the sudden miracle-like recovery of her formerly dementia-addled mother, Ada. For her happy-go-lucky brother Andrzej and his wife, it is another reason to celebrate, but Mula and the audience will pick up on ominous signs and a general vibe of foreboding.

Isabella Eklöf’s Holiday is bound to be the most divisive film at Brooklyn Horror for content reasons (we saw it at Sundance and still don’t feel like revisiting it), but Tower is bound to inspire equally divided reactions, solely for its aesthetic. Just calling it a horror movie is controversial (but defensible). Szelc truly instills the film with an utterly eerie vibe (it is almost Hanging Rock-esque), but she is maddeningly committed to its ambiguous indeterminacy. What ultimately happens? It gets big-picture apocalyptic, yet it is still hard to say with any certainty.

Regardless of all that, great credit is due to the ensemble (a few of whom are actually related), which truly convinces us they are a messy, unruly, angst-ridden family. Malgorzata Szczerbowska sets off all sorts of alarm bells as Kaja, yet we sometimes feel instinctively inclined to take her side against her overbearing sister. Anna Krotoska is forceful yet nakedly exposed (sometimes literally) as the martyr-complex-suffering Mula. Yet, Artur Krajewski is probably more unsettling than anyone playing the unnamed priest, who is undeniably losing his faith and might even be the subject of some sort of insidious supernatural attack.

Frankly, this film has A24 (the distributor of The Witch, Woodshock, and It Comes at Night) written all over it. The atmosphere is haunting, but the narrative so excessively murky, it becomes impossible to take any real meaning from it. The vibe is strong and there are a number of interesting bits, but it might behoove Szelc to work with a co-screenwriter on her next project. Only recommended for hipster cineastes who prefer genre films on the obscure side of the spectrum, Tower. A Bright Day had its East Coast premiere at this year’s Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.

Fantastic Fest ’18: Werewolf

After the horror came a coda of terror for these painfully young survivors. They were liberated from a concentration camp by the Russians, only to be abandoned in a remote improvised orphanage. Unfortunately, they are still threatened by demons, both external and internal, in Adrian Panek’s Werewolf (trailer here), which had its international premiere at the 2018 Fantastic Fest.

Nobody turns feral when the full moon rises in this film. These werewolves are metaphorical, referring to the beasts we keep at bay inside. However, there really is a pack of vicious dogs. They are sort of like the canines in White God, but less allegorical and really in no way supernatural.

Ranging from five-ish to the twenty-year-old Hanka, the children have been deposited in a crumbling grand manor house, under the supervision of the bereaved Jadwiga. Alas, their sardonic protector will not last long, leaving them to face the pack of snarling dogs that surrounds their new home completely on their own. The children will be prisoners within the house, forgotten by the not-so compassionate Russians. With food and water running short, they will have to start improvising. Unfortunately, there is also dissension within, stemming from Janek and Wladek’s romantic interest in Hanka and resentment over the former’s German nationality.

This is a film that could have gone perilously wrong in so many ways, but Panek always keeps it on the right side and totally on solid ground. We see the various survival strategies that have been ingrained into the children, but even when Janek is at his worst, he still very clearly remains a traumatized little boy, whom we have sympathy for.

Sonia Mietielica, Nicolas Przgoda, and Kamil Polnisiak are all quite remarkable as Hanka, Janek, and Wladek, respectively. They each portray deeply wounded characters, in mature and challenging ways, but they also handle the business of being stuck in a Cujo-like situation quite convincingly.

Technically, Werewolf is also quite an assured, well-put-together package. Cinematographer Dominik Danilczyk gives it the look of an ominous fable, while the design team (production designer Anna Wunderlich, art director Marcin Aziukiewicz) really make the mansion-turned-orphanage look like a shabby monument to faded days of glory. In many ways, it is a heartbreaking film, but it also allows for the possibility of hope—and maybe even forgiveness. Very highly recommended, Werewolf screens again Wednesday (9/26), as part of this year’s Fantastic Fest.

Kino Polska ’18: Zud

Nomads can’t bet the farm, but they have livestock. Unfortunately, young Sukhbat’s family lost their herd to a sudden snap of winter foulness. Now their only hope to avoid ruin is winning a regional horse race. Growing up is hard, but so is every other aspect of life in Marta Minorowicz’s Zud (trailer here), which screens during this year’s Kino Polska at the BAM Cinematek.

The characters and settings are pure Mongolian, but this is a Polish film. Likewise, it certainly has the look and feel of an unscripted observational documentary, but it is in fact a fictional narrative. However, the difficulties facing Mongolia’s nomadic herders is certainly true enough. Presumably, the cast of steppe-based nomads could relate. Indeed, there is probably a good deal of inadvertent method acting going on in this film.

Sukhbat’s father is deeply in debt and the note is already past-due. The lending authorities will not give him anymore time, despite the loss of his cattle. He therefore places all his hopes on a promising young wild stallion he has just broken. Sukhbat will be the jockey and serve as the horse’s primary training, or at least that is what he is told. Alas, nothing he does is ever good enough for his micromanaging father, who is clearly feeling the pressure of their precarious situation.

This is one tough coming of age story. Minorowicz’s portrayal of nomadic life clearly suggests families are not held together by love but by a survival imperative. It certainly feels true to life, since it was shot on remote locations, employing nonprofessional local actors, seemingly playing thinly fictionalized analogs of themselves. She also films with an anthropologist’s eye, investing considerable time in many of the regular tasks and everyday rituals that have defined her characters’ lives.

Frankly, Minorowicz could have easily passed Zud off as a legit documentary if she wanted to, so give her credit for being forthright. Presumably, she also made the film she set out to make, so she and Kenneth McBride should want all their due credit for their screenplay. Yet, it is hard to imagine how scripted many of these scenes could have been.

Regardless of all that, as his namesake, Sukhbat Batsaikhan is a highly compelling young protagonist. You would assume he is really just going about his chores, heedless of the camera. However, Batsaikhan Budee is an even more impressive actor, because all of his anxiety and stress looks alarmingly real.

Zud is a quiet, immersive film, but it packs an arsenic-laced punch in the final minutes. Despite being a narrative, it will not be sufficiently narrative-driven for conventional viewers, but it absolutely lets the audience place themselves in lives that are radically different from our own. Recommended more as an experience than a film per se, Zud screens Friday night (9/21), as part of Kino Polska at BAM.

Fantaspoa ’18: The Man with the Magic Box

The level of technology is different, but 1952 Stalinist Poland and its dystopian future circa 2030 do not look that much different from each other. There is rationing in both time periods: water in the future and everything else in the past. Yet, there is a good reason Adam is so keenly interested in the somewhat Orwellian future. Her name is Goria. Much to her own surprise, they will be a secret item in Bodo Kox’s The Man with the Magic Box (trailer here), which screens as part of this year’s Fantaspoa in Brazil.

Without explanation, Adam finds himself in the future. The opening prologue suggests it will not go well, but there seem to be several helpful people around, who are willing to help him get acclimated. They even arrange a janitorial job for him at an imposing office tower. It is there that he meets Goria. Obviously, she is important, because she has her own office, not that there are any privacy benefits to it. The future is very Bloomberg Media, with open work-stations, glass walls, and translucent computer monitors.

They immediately catch each other’s eye, but she blows him off hard. Yet, he keeps plugging away, which she loves. Soon, a spontaneous hook-up during a terrorist attack morphs into something potentially more serious and long-term. That would suit Adam, but his footing in this world is tenuous as best. He seems to have a connection to the past, which he sees in visions and hears through phantom broadcasts he picks up with a vintage console radio (one of those wirelesses, with wires). He also starts to attract the unwanted attention of the secret police.

Arguably, Magic Box is like a cross between Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Somewhere in Time. It does not offer a very elaborate vision of the future, but it feels more real and fully realized than the recent remake of Fahrenheit 451. True, the narrative stepping stones do not always fit together with perfect logic, but the central relationship is consistently intriguing and redemptive. Honestly, the star-crossed but deeply passionate romance that develops between the caustic Goria and the socially awkward Adam would still hold viewer interest in a contemporary non-genre movie.

Olga Boladz is simply amazing as Goria. She is not exactly a plastic-looking model-type, but wow, can she make an entrance. Even in subtitles, her acid-tongued line deliveries are wickedly droll. Piotr Polak’s Adam is her polar opposite, but it is the sort of deceptively quiet, deeply sincere performance that sneaks up on viewers. Sebastian Stanki Stankiewicz also pulls off some surprises as Adam’s broom-pushing colleague Bernard, who initially just seems like weird comic relief, but holds some significant secrets.

Like a magpie, Kox borrows elements from films across the genre spectrum, notably including Brazil, Men in Black, and no kidding, Being John Malkovich. Yet, the linkage between Poland’s Communist past and feared dystopian future give them all significance and purpose. Kox also them together in interesting ways (unlike certain post-apocalyptic movies we could mention) and never lets anything interrupt the chemistry of his leads. Very highly recommended (in spite of and maybe in appreciation of its baffling loose ends), The Man with the Magic Box screens tomorrow (5/23) during this year’s Fantaspoa.

Sundance ’18: Black (short)

Imagine the film Gravity raised to the power of one hundred and you might start to understand the situation these two Japanese astronauts face. It turns out the last two people in the world are actually orbiting in space. The outlook is grim, but their final mission still holds meaning in Tomasz Popakul’s starkly black-and-white animated short film Black (trailer here), which screens as part of the Midnight Shorts Program at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival in Park City.

During their time on the space station, nuclear war quickly and shockingly swept across the globe, leaving Haruko and Yoshi cut off from Earth. She generally copes by focusing on their original experiments, while he carefully monitors and records each new mushroom cloud. Ironically, the first day without an explosion leaves them (and us) feeling chillingly hollow, rather than relieved. There is a lot that goes unsaid between them, but their gaunt look and the increasingly distressed condition of the station tell viewers everything we need to know.

Realized by the Polish Popakul during his time as in Tokyo as an “Animation Artist in Residence,” Black is a short film of tremendous power. The central relationship, brought to life by Japanese voice actors Rina Takamura and Ryo Iwase, is acutely believable and deeply poignant. The sharp relief of Popakul’s black-and-white imagery is also absolutely stunning. You can clearly see a manga influence, but it is darker and moodier, not unlike the rotoscoped Alois Nebel. Regardless, the film just pops off the screen.

Black is as serious as any doomsday movie can get, yet it is not a downer. In fact, it leaves us exhilarated by its tragic beauty. This is fantastic, awards-caliber animation that is sure to leave the late-night crew dazzled. Very highly recommended, Black screens again with the rest of the Midnight Shorts tonight (1/20) and Friday (1/26) in Park City, as well as next Saturday (1/27) in Salt Lake, as part of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Stanislaw Lem on Film: Professor Zazul (short)

Stanisław Lem’s famous space-traveler Ijon Tichy is the sort of fellow who could possibly save or destroy the universe. He always understood the science of his wacky circumstances, but he was known to be klutzy and guileless. However, he caught a nice break when he was depicted by the distinguished-looking Piotr Kurowski in two short films produced for Polish television, including Marek Nowicki & Jerzy Stawicki’s Professor Zazul, which screens as part of Stanisław Lem on Film, the upcoming retrospective survey of cinema based on the work of the great Polish science fiction writer.

Initially, the 1962 short appears to have more of the trappings of a horror film when Tichy is forced to take refuge in an old dark house during a severe storm. It turns out the place even has a mysterious laboratory and a scientist, who is most likely quite mad. That would indeed be Zazul—sort of.

Frankly, Zazul feels considerably ahead of its time, given its doppelganger themes, the circular structure, and the generally slippery nature of reality. In retrospect, it looks like considerable resources went into its twenty-two minutes of air time, including set decorations worthy of the best Frankenstein films and a groovy vibraphone-heavy soundtrack composed by Edward Pałłasz. Plus, the frequent product placement for Coca-Cola is almost bemusingly surreal, given the era—early 1960s Poland.

Kurowski plays Tichy as a rather intelligent and principled fellow, but the film still stays largely true to the vibe of Lem’s humorously outlandish stories. Stanisław Milski certainly gets his Ernest Thesinger on playing the sinister scientist, which gives the proceedings extra added genre appeal. Recommended for Lem admirers and fans of Eastern European science fiction in the funky DEFA tradition, Professor Zazul screens this Wednesday (11/1) and Saturday (11/11) as part of the shorts program during Anthology Film Archive’s Lem film series.

Stanislaw Lem on Film: The Investigation

The word mystery has several connotations, but they are largely incompatible for Scotland Yard Inspector Gregory. He catches criminals—period. Questions of truth and metaphysics are way outside his comfort zone. Unfortunately, he will be forced to go there in Marek Piestrak’s adaptation of The Investigation, which screens as part of Stanisław Lem on Film, the upcoming retrospective survey of cinema based on the work of the great Polish science fiction writer.

It started weirdly. Various provincial morgues and funeral parlors started reporting instances of corpses being tampered with. However, just as Gregory takes the lead on the serial corpse-mover investigation, it escalates to include full-fledged walking dead. Of course, Gregory does not believe anything supernatural could be afoot. It is all just part of some eccentric criminal’s plan to sow chaos and confusion amongst the populace. He will never accept any outlandish or uncanny explanations, even when he maybe possibly sees one of the missing dead people riding the bus.

Unfortunately, science does not do him any favors either. Dr. Sciss is a statistician volunteering his services with Scotland Yard, but all he offers up is a correlation between areas of reported dead body activity and significantly low rates of cancer. Almost perversely (from Gregory’s standpoint), Sciss starts pushing him to think about the problem in more cosmic terms. As a result, he starts to suspect the statistician of being his super-villain.

The Investigation is a sly and heady novel, but it would be a challenge to adapt it dramatically. Nevertheless, Polish television took at least two cracks at it. Piestrak and co-screenwriter Andrzej Kotkowski are remarkably faithful to its somewhat loose narrative and rigorous philosophical inquiry. To make it even stranger, The Investigation boasts a massively funky soul jazz soundtrack by Włodzimierz Nahorny that feels completely at odds with the film’s Bertrand Russell-esque logical-epistemological gamesmanship, but holy smokes, does it ever sound fantastic.

Like a good soldier, Tadeusz Borowski tries to make Gregory more plodding than Maigret. However, Edmund Fetting gives the film some edge as the Inspector’s arrogant but more politically astute commander, Sheppard. As a pseudo-surrogate for the filmmakers, Sheppard clearly has little faith in the bureaucracy’s chances of saving the day.

The early 1970s TV film totally captures the look of its era, but Nahorny makes it sound timeless. Although Lem’s short novel was originally published in 1959, his philosophical provocations have not been undermined by advances in forensic science. In short, it all holds up jolly well. Highly recommended, The Investigation screens this Wednesday (11/1) and Saturday (11/11) as part of Anthology Film Archive’s Lem film series.

NYFF ’17: Spoor

It turns out Count Zaroff was right. Man is the most dangerous game. Something is poaching the poachers, because it is never hunting season for well-armed male chauvinists in this ridiculously backward Polish village. We had a good run at the top of the food chain, but the natural world just might be fighting back in Agnieszka Holland & Kasia Adamik’s disappointing Spoor (trailer here), which screens as a Main Slate selection of the 55^th New York Film Festival.

A retired engineer and part-time school teacher like Janina Duszejko ought to be a forceful advocate for animal rights, but whenever she tries to file a complaint against poachers, she ends up sputtering incomprehensible moral outrage. It makes it easy for the venal police chief to disregard her, but still earns her plenty of enemies. Waking one morning to find her beloved dogs missing, Duszejko suspects the worst and her fears are justified. However, a noxious poacher turns up dead shortly thereafter. The circumstances are suspicious, but baffling, since the only tracks leading up to the body are of the four-legged variety (you know, animal spoor).

Is something supernaturally natural afoot, as in Fessenden’s The Last Winter and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, or is there a more Scooby-Doo explanation, involving Old Man Smitters and a wolf costume? Somehow, Holland and co-screenwriter Olga Tokarczuk (adapting her own novel) come up with an answer that will leave all sides deeply unsatisfied, which is sort of perversely admirable.

We are supposed to be charmed and impressed by Duszejko’s pluckiness, but it is frankly annoying how she is always feeling things so deeply. She even recruits an amiably geeky hacker to her cause, but her strategy still largely consists of ineffectual tantrums. Her motives for investigating the murders never really compute either, especially if they are the result of Mother Nature rising up.

Nevertheless, Holland’s skill as a filmmaker remains crystal clear throughout Spoor. Holland, co-director Adamik, and cinematographers Jolanta Dylewska and Rafal Paradowski give it an evocatively icy noir look. Just watching it will make you feel chilly. Holland also manages to maintain a palpable sense of tension, despite giving us so little in terms of real deal genre business. Viewers just keep watching, because they will feel like something significant is always about to happen.

Agnieszka Mandat-Grabka is fine as Duszejko, but like her character, she probably would have reaped better results by working smarter rather than working harder. Clearly, subtlety was not a priority for anyone involved. Nicely atmospheric but filled with light-weight polemics, Spoor should not be a priority when it screens this Saturday (9/30) and Sunday (10/1), as part of the 2017 NYFF.

Wajda’s Afterimage

Few film directors were as well qualified to address the intersection of art and politics as Andrzej Wajda. For decades, he was bedeviled by Communist censorship, but in 1989 he was elected to the Polish Senate as a member of Solidarity. Wajda would later help found the Polish Museum of Communism to document and preserve the truth about the Communist era. It was a mission that also motivated many of Wajda’s late career masterworks. Unlike Wajda, Constructivist painter and modern art theoretician Władysław Strzemiński unfortunately did not survive the state’s campaign against him and the insufficiently ideological style of art he represented. Fittingly, Strzemiński is the subject of Wajda’s final, masterful film Afterimage (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Strzemiński was a double-amputee war veteran, but he lost his arm and leg during the First World War, which did not quite have the political cachet granted to the Great Patriotic War under the new Socialist regime. Nevertheless, he still painted prolifically and became a force within the Polish art world. He was a leading faculty member in the Łodz art academy later renamed in his honor and designed the Neoplastic Room, a gallery within the Museum Sztuki showcasing modernist art of the 1920s and 1930s, including the sculpture of his ex-wife Katarzyna Kobro. Even though Strzemiński had once been a revolutionary firebrand, he took a dim view of any attempt to impose ideology on art, most definitely including Socialist Realism.

Consequently, the State deliberately set out to crush Strzemiński, despite his popularity with his students and his international prominence. Initially, the artist assumes the authorities’ belligerence will quickly blow over, but his situation grows dire when he is dismissed from the Lodz academy and blackballed from other means of employment. He is not even allowed to purchase art supplies after the artists’ union expels him. To further compound the tragedy, Strzemiński finds himself the sole support of his pre-teen daughter after her mother Kobro succumbs to a long illness.

It is easy to see how Wajda would identify with Strzemiński. Although he is closely associated with the so-called “Cinema of Moral Concern,” Wajda predated the movement by decades. He produced his first documentary shorts during the early 1950s, the final years of Strzemiński’s life. He was witness to those times and films like Afterimage are his testimony.

Indeed, Wajda and screenwriter Andrzej Mularczyk do not sugar-coat any aspect of his life-story, least of all the ruthlessness of the Party apparatus brought to bear against him. Nor do they try to install Strzemiński as a Constructivist saint. The lead performance of Bogusław Linda (the dollmaker in Dekalog: Seven) is acutely human and deeply nuanced. Strzemiński very definitely has an “artistic temperament.” He can be brusque and self-centered, but he also has a high capacity for empathy and a genuine passion for art. In no possible way can Linda’s Strzemiński be reduced to a catch-all cliché, but that is exactly what the Party set out to do.

Young Bronisława Zamachowska is also quite remarkable as Strzemiński’s not quite estranged daughter Nika, displaying maturity beyond her years in her scenes with Linda. She projects real grit and sensitivity, so it is a heavy moment when Strzemiński remarks to a student she will have a hard life because of him.

Rather appropriately, Afterimage is also a film of powerful visuals, from the huge banner of Stalin blocking the light into Strzemiński’s flat to the skewed perspective on his ironic death scene. This is Wajda’s final film, but it is not an awkward swan song. Throughout every frame, his skill and artistry are just as sharp as ever and his passion for truth and freedom remain undiminished. It is another major film from arguably the single most important filmmaker of our lifetimes. Very highly recommended, Afterimage opens this Friday (5/19) in New York, at the Lincoln Plaza.

Panorama Europe ’17: The Erlprince

If “The Boy” is correct, there could be infinite alternate universes, but puberty is probably still miserable for him in each and every one of them. Unfortunately, he will not have time to grow out of it, because the end of the world is nigh. To top it off, he also has mother issues in Kuba Czekaj’s The Erlprince (trailer here), which screens during this year’s Panorama Europe, at MoMI.

The opening sequence deliberates echoes Goethe’s The Erlking, with key differences. The Boy’s oppressively controlling mother is driving through the night to their new digs. Physically he is fine, but emotionally he is far from hale and hearty. The rest of the world isn’t doing very well either. As part of his research into parallel dimensions, the physics prodigy has become convinced doomsday is fast approaching for his current universe.

Into this claustrophobic family unit comes “The Man.” Given his shared history with “The Mother,” he is most likely the Boy’s father, but he has never been allowed to serve in that role until now. His presence is a healthy influence on the boy, but it is probably too late for the prodigy and the world. Eventually, his psyche will shatter, with each shard reflecting a different parallel plane of reality.

Frankly, viewers shouldn’t get too hung up on the narrative arc of Erlprince. Czekaj is more interested in marrying up post-Einstein psychics with darkly fantastical romantic archetypes. Unfortunately, it all probably sounds more mind-blowing than it really is. The first two acts are dominated by teen angst and family dysfunction, whereas the third act largely compares and contrasts the Boy’s various possible Sliding Doors­-esque alternate fates. We see the Boy getting bullied by girls, before his mother comes to his rescue. There are also hints of gender-bending when the Mother adopts a boyish haircut, presumably to fill the Boy’s father figure vacancy (however, making out with the Boy’s homeroom teacher seems to be taking it to dubious extremes).

As the boy prince of physics, Staszek Cywka is a veritable picture of teen neuroses. However, Agnieszka Podsiadlik is an overpowering force to reckon with as the hot mess Mother, like a cross between Terminator’s Sarah Connor and Mommie Dearest’s Joan Crawford. Yes, you can certainly call her domineering.

The ambition of Erlprince is laudable, but it really more of a film to dispassionately analyze than a viewing experience to get swept up in. Still, Adam Palenta’s stylishly severe cinematography perfects suits the film’s cerebral alienation. Czekaj has loads of talent, but Erlprince will be limited in its appeal. Recommended for those who dig postmodern science fiction, it screens tomorrow afternoon (5/13) at MoMI, as part of this year’s Panorama Europe.