http://www.nypff.com/index.html
Two different countries, two different cultures. But are Polish and American mentalities really poles apart? The fourth annual New York Polish Film Festival poses once again the same question—can Eastern European cinema ever clime the greasy pole and reach Bollywood’s popularity among the McDonald’s nation. One thing is certain: it’s worth a try. And NYPFF is one of the very few screenings of Polish movies in the Big Apple. Worse still, many movies never leave Poland’s movie theatres; many of them don’t even have English subtitles—like Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn, which got its translation only out of necessity, when the movie got an Academy Award nomination this year (the jury does not speak Polish).
Right now Polish cinema in the U.S. is far low on the totem pole. But if anything should change, it would be festivals like this one that can make it happen.
If Polish jokes got popular, why not the movies?
Here are three selected feature films that will be shown in the Anthology Film Archives this May.
Lukasz Palkowski’s Preserve or WES ANDERSON MEETS THE HOOLIGANS
Preserve takes us on a trip to the part of Warsaw nobody looks to discover (maybe except for Roman Polanski who shot The Pianist in that area, but we’re talking about WWII). Prague is a God- and law enforcement-forsaken neighborhood on the Eastern bank of Vistula river, where knowing the locals’ behavioral code is the sole way for survival and buying a bottle of cheap wine is the most cherished ceremony of the courtyard bums. That infamous neighborhood, which director Lukasz Palkowski depicts with a loving and humorous eye, becomes a new home to a young photographer, Marcin, who having sold his soul to the hectic magazine publishing lifestyle, is suddenly forced to look for a cheap locum in the outskirts of Poland’s capital. His troubles continue to pile up as his hegemonic editor-in-chief assigns him a piece about “the real nature of the Warsaw Prague”. Capturing the true beauty of Prague is, as the photographer soon learns, not only difficult but quite dangerous. Marcin has to leave his city boy’s life behind and infiltrate this decadent, tacky environment full of sleeping gown-wearing land ladies, courtyard drunks, and frustrated hooligans. A local hairdresser, beautiful Hanka B. and a grotesque redheaded boy soon join Marcin in what ends up as a quest for discovering the forgotten values and simple, human emotions and fraternity of the old world, lost in the fast paced, artificial 21st
century. The director takes us plunging into the dark side of Warsaw and shows its real and realistic tenants with their particular sense of humor and a specific joie de vivre.
Saturday, May 10, 7:00 p.m.
Wieslaw Saniewski’s The Immensity of Justice or BRIAN DE PALMA GOES EASTERN EUROPEAN
This thriller is based on a true crime story from the 1990s-- a young and attractive female journalist was brutally murdered (when eight months pregnant). The court sentenced her lover and work colleague, even though the man never pleaded guilty and the prosecutors never found definite proofs of his guilt. The action starts when a young law school alumni, who undergoes existential dilemmas (he does not believe law to be his calling anymore) accepts a job at the office of the lawyer who worked on the infamous case almost two decades ago. The mysterious murder becomes the young man’s obsession, and finding the truth- especially whether or not the
court wrongfully sentenced an innocent man- turns out to be something more than just a job practice for him.
Sunday, May 11, 9:15p.m.
Piotr Uklanski’s Summer Love or RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SARCASM
To contradict the opinion of most American critics—the first Polish western is more than pierogi and kielbasa. Even though the action of Summer Love takes place in the old Wild West, you will find striking parabolas between the movie and modern life. Located in the conceptual middle of nowhere, the film reaches beyond its mockingly assumed genre. Though the Polish mountainside and the Baltic beach constitute a poor imitation of the Rockies and Midwestern deserts, the movie wittingly renders an ambience of the genre - then flips it, shakes it, adds some grotesque characters, slightly insane logic and sarcastic sketchiness, only to spit it out with a huge amount of blood. The story becomes an attempted archetype of a typical western. There is the good guy-- Sheriff, the sensual Woman, and the Stranger who arrives into the small, ramshackle, god-forsaken town with corpse of the Wanted Man (played by Val Kilmer (!) ). Besides the setting and protagonists, not much is really conventional, and it seems that the characters are meant to represent something slightly different and more modern than what the original conquerors of the western frontier were all about.
Monday, May 12, 8:30p.m.
