From the 9th to the 16th of November, Torun hosted the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography EnergaCAMERIMAGE, dedicated to the emerging talents of the cinema. During those 8 days, the visitors of the festival could not only watch films showcasing the art of cinematography, but also personally see and even speak with the maestros of the X muse.
Contemporary Lynx presents you 5 films of the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography EnergaCAMERIMAGE, which are unforgettable.
“Border” / Dir. Ali Abbasi
With her supernatural talent to feel what one is hiding Tina is a valuable customs officer. With an amazing sense of smell, this woman with an ugly face detects the most ugly human feelings and catches the contrabandists. During a regular workday, Tina stops a strange passenger with a perky smile and a similar monstrous face, Vore, without knowing that this meeting on the border will involve the crossing of all borders.
Iranian director Ali Abbasi’s new film, based on the story of the same name by Ajvide Lindqvist, whose main characters are trolls, is a fairy tale for adults about non-binary gender, body positivity, edges of human soul, sexuality and understanding that the uniqueness is not a gift. Border tells about the likelihood of the meeting someone like you is extremely low and even having found “that one and only” there is no warranty that this person is not a boundless bastard.
Border – Dir. Ali Abbasi, 2018
“Dolce Fine Giornata” / Dir. Jacek Borcuch
The main character of Jacek Borcuch’s elegant drama Dolce Fine Giornata is a Polish poetess, Nobel Prize winner in Literature and simply freedom-loving woman. Maria Linde has everything: a house in warm Tuscany, a loving husband, a daughter, a lover from Egypt. And she also has a gap between family duty and love, a fear of ageism and a creativity crisis. And to this Maria’s emotional baggage adds the shock caused by the bombing of the square in Rome by terrorists. Because of the internal conflict arisen after that event, during the award ceremony the poetess pronounces the words that will immediately change her life: “a terrorist attack can be named a piece of art”.
The caustic and satirical on the rich and privileged bourgeois Dolce Fine Giornata raises not only the problems of racism and emigration, but also the theme of the truth. The truth that the world doesn’t need, which can hurt and destroy, especially the one telling it.
Dolce Fine Giornata – Dir. Jacek Borcuch, 2019
“Beanpole” / Dir. Kantemir Balagov
Kantemir Balagov’s film takes place in the autumn of 1945 in Leningrad. Caravaggio himself would have admired the beauty of the main character, Iya. The name of a tall and stately woman comes from the Latin word “violet”, but the girl is called the Beanpole. Iya works in a hospital, where she constantly suffers from convulsions: her muscles become wooden and each breath is followed by pain. In her free time, the girl takes care of the boy with a grim look, Pasha. One day, a friend from the front, Masha comes to Iya. She is also a victim of the military trauma: having survived the years of the humanity self-destruction, she became barren.
At the 72nd Cannes film festival 27-year-old Russian director with an astonishing potential won the Un Certain Regard Best Director Award and the FIPRESCI Prize for Best Film in the Un Certain Regard section. It should be noticed Kantemir wasn’t afraid of the question whether his film would be so well received in the country of production, where it used to speak about two women’s love in a whisper. As a result, the director not only managed to show this subject gracefully, but also with the virtuosity of the maestro to portray a female soul surrounded by melancholy, fear and pain, which even destroys love.
Beanpole – Dir. Kantemir Balagov, 2019
“Mr. Jones” / Dir. Agnieszka Holland
At the beginning of the film, Gareth Jones loses his job as a special adviser and has no idea what to do next. He decides to go to Moscow in the hope of interviewing Stalin himself. Despite the fact some people ridicule his idea of this interview, he nonetheless goes to Moscow, where he discovers that his colleague was robbed and killed. The journalist feels that something suspicious is happening, so he finds out on which issue his friend worked and then goes to Stalino, a small village in Ukraine. There the journalist becomes a witness of utter ruin and horrendous starvation. Facts about that were hushed up and weren’t broadcast either to the Soviet, or especially the Western public. Gareth Jones decides to write an article about what he saw in order to tell about the current state of affairs in the Soviet Union, but this is turns out to be not simple.
Agnieszka Holland’s movie is brave and provocative. Mr. Jones is not only the first film about outstanding British journalist, but also the first high-profile film about the Holodomor. As it was hushed up about the hunger in Ukraine during the Soviet Union, it is hushed up now, therefore Holland successfully manages to bring this event to the audience and moreover to tell about the person who had changed the story.
Mr. Jones – Dir. Agnieszka Holland, 2019
“Katka” / Dir. Helena Trestikova
During 90 minutes Helena Trestikova shows us the fall of a young girl named Katka. Starting the film with a sad demonstration of the 19-year-old Katka in a drug addiction center, the director enters her life for 13 years.
Katka is addicted to destruction. She is addicted to drugs, for which she even becomes a prostitute. She is addicted to toxic relationships in which she constantly expierience physical abuse. But even having the opportunity to become addicted to something bright, to her own child, Katka still decides not to leave the circle of self-destruction.
For Trestikova it’s hard to get out of the main character’s life, so the film ends with Katka’s disappearing from the frame. The viewer will never know whether the girl has disappeared from the frame forever or she has managed to save her own life. But also, no one, not even the director herself, will ever know the answer to the question: why do people choose slow suicide and is there freedom in this?
Katka – Dir. Helena Trestikova, 2010
