Poland

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In 1976 Kieslowski produced Hospital, the 1977 winner of the Festival of Short
Films in Krakow. The film deals with Warsaw orthopaedic surgeons who are portrayed working long, 32-hour shifts. The camera follows them in the operating theatre, admittance room and smoky offices. They are portrayed as struggling with faulty equipment and overcoming fatigue. The film focuses on everyday hospital situations without any voice-over comments, with the passage of time carefully indicated every hour. The surgeons are portrayed as skilled workers in this, to use Kieslowski’s words, ‘film about some brotherhood’.
– Marek Haltof, The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski – Variations on Destiny and Chance, 2006Read More »

A pristine transport-stream recording of Jan Jakub Kolski’s beautiful early short film, Ładny dzień. Whilst his subsequent works are enjoyable, none have the same visual brilliance found here. One suspects that Kolski perhaps now views the work as immature, given that it’s so heavily influenced by Tarkovsky, but there’s a singular vision here that’s very special. The expressive use of colour, framing and montage is utterly captivating, and the beauty of the screenshots is self-evident.Read More »

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A war drama showing the functioning of Hitler’s “racial purity” law, forbidding foreign workers from any contact with Germany. Foreigners on forced labor in Nazi Germany. Death, imprisonment or stigmatization awaited both sides for closer contacts with the Germans. A Pole, Władysław, and a widow and her daughter Linda, another Pole for an affair with a German girl, two American prisoners of war and a German woman who gave birth to a child to one of them, a German soldier who met his dream girl in a foreigner, Marice.Read More »

Two scientists are placed in hibernation and should be awaken after three years. But when they wake up, it turns out that it has been fifty years, and they are the only two males in a new, underground society composed exclusively of women.Read More »

Poland, during the World War. Lotna is a magnificent specimen of Arabian horse, the
pride of her owner, too old to actually ride her but to whom she remains faithful
nevertheless. The Polish cavalry army is also proud of their land, and loyal to rules, and
custom. The German army is leading an overwhelming speed attack with tanks, an
almost unheard of weapon, and bringing a way of life to an end. It’s the last battle
between Lotna (speed horse) and Blitzkriega (speed war).Read More »

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A rehearsal of the Andrzej Kurylewicz quintet is underway in the radio recording studio. The lineup includes: Jan Ptaszyn Wróblewski, Andrzej Dąbrowski, Wojciech Karolak, Roman Dylag. A well-arranged whole begins to emerge from the polyphony of voices and sounds.Read More »

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“Ambulance” is a less than 10-minute etude with metaphorical overtones. The film opens with Hitler’s off-screen speech about the necessity of destroying the Jewish race. The appeal ends with the image of a group of children waiting in an empty square for their last journey. The title ambulance, which is normally used to save lives, becomes a tool of their extermination.Read More »

Nominated for the Golden Lion in 1961 at the venice Film festival

“Samson” is the story of a Jew, Jakub Gold (Serge Merlin), at the polytechnic university in Warsaw imprisoned and sentenced to 10 years for accidentally killing his friend in German- occupied Poland. In prison he makes several contacts that will factor later in the movie. The prisoners are released when Warsaw is bombed. Jakub is sent to the Warsaw ghetto where the Jews are “doomed to death for the crime of existence” and is assigned to picking up corpses from the streets and helping to provide them with a Jewish burial. Along the way he picks up his own mother. After one such burial Jakub and another man escape from the ghetto. After he escapes he desires to go back into the ghetto to share the fate of his kinsmen. Read More »

On a gray, foggy morning outside a large Polish city, Zhenia (Alec Utgoff), a masseur from the East, enters the lives of the wealthy residents of a gated community. Using hypnotic, almost magical techniques to get a residence permit, he starts working. The well-to-do residents in their cookie-cutter homes seemingly have it all, but they all suffer from an inner sadness, some unexplained longing. The attractive and mysterious newcomer’s hands heal, and Zhenia’s eyes seem to penetrate their souls. To them, his Russian accent sounds like a song from the past, a memory of their seemingly safer childhoods.Read More »