A bridegroom is possessed by an unquiet spirit in the midst of his own wedding celebration, in this clever take on the Jewish legend of the dybbuk.
http://nitroflare.com/view/C6C009580620F09/Demon.2015.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv
Language(s):Polish, English, Yiddish
Subtitles:English,Polish (Polish subs only cover the Yiddish part)
Synopsis:
In the 18th century, a recently deceased young man is exhumed by a gravedigger, suddenly revives, and then launches into the story of his highly eventful life. Brought up in a puritanical household, Robert is seduced by a mysterious stranger into killing his wine-, woman- and song-loving brother. What follows is a descent into a hallucinatory hell, where reality and illusion merge, as Robert’s evil doppelganger sins with terrible abandon–and Robert stands accused.
Review:
Scottish author James Hogg’s 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, a kind of religious satire/polemic crossed with a doppelganger tale and a forerunner of the plot twists of both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Fight Club, ends with a curse against anyone tampering with its text.
In 1988, celebrated Scots filmmaker Bill Douglas prepared a screenplay adaptation, but died before he could get it made. I was present when the producer suggested it as a suitable project for Lindsay Anderson to take over, but Anderson himself died not long afterwards. A fresh script has recently been created by crime writer Ian Rankin and James Mavor, but has yet to go before the cameras. Those involved are advised to beware falling objects, shadowy assassins, sudden illnesses.
But in 1985, Polish director Wojciech Has created his own version, Osobisty pamietnik grzesznika przez niego samego spisany, known more briefly and prosaically in English as Memoirs of a Sinner, and lived to tell the tale. This filmmaker had a substantial history of adapting difficult and strange classics, with his version of Jan Potocki’s The Saragossa Manuscript (1965) amounting to his best-known movie, and Bruno Schult’s The Hourglass Sanatorium adding further credit to his name.
Has’s version of the story maintains its central weirdness, in which the narrator is plagued by a devilish emissary who sometimes looks just like him, and sometimes seems to take his place to perform foul crimes. Hogg’s satiric purpose in extending the Calvinist principle of predestination (best stated onscreen in Paul Schrader’s Hardcore) is slightly obfuscated, and Has uses the tale more as a device to create unease and intrigue and create beautiful images, richly colored, hazily soft-focus, and with a slyly gliding camera which sometimes imparts an almost three-dimensional effect, aided by the different hues of light pooling his sets.
Whereas Hogg ends his book with an editor’s statement claiming that the manuscript presented was exhumed from the author’s coffin, Has goes one further and opens his movie on what appears to be the Day of Resurrection, with zombies squirming from their tombs in a blue-tinged, crepuscular magic hour cemetery. The protagonist, played by Piotr Bajor (handsome despite orange wig), is dragged from his muddy pit at rope’s end and begins to narrate his life story to a gang of what may be body snatchers, who are almost immediately impatient for him to finish. But this is an art movie, and the tale will not be hurried.
What to make of this oddball adaptation, which muddies the point of its already somewhat gnomic source novel (Hogg recounts most of the same events twice, from the viewpoints of different halves of his schizoid narrator, a device most screenwriters would likely shy away from) but vividly renders many of the ghastly and mystic events? It’s likely to appeal to those with a well-developed negative capability, but the lush palette and elaborate design help ease any discomfort with the story’s often bewildering turns. The performances are also uniformly strong and amusing, which helps assure us that there is some defined purpose behind the story, even if we’re not allowed to know what it is.
Another pleasing quality: apart from one blonde girl with what looks like a perm and lip gloss, it would be nigh impossible to guess when it was made: it looks more like a film of the sixties or seventies, but could even be nineties: Has appears indifferent to film fashion, and his period flavor is pungent and pervasive. The Lynch of Lost Highway and the Bava of Kill Baby Kill both lurk somewhere nearby. A good movie to lose yourself in, but unwinding a ball of string behind you as you go may be advisable.
— MUBI [David Cairns]
http://nitroflare.com/view/3840D87F76DCF97/Memoirs_Of_A_Sinner_%281986%29_–_Wojciech_Has.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/85A1C7B03DFA2AD/Memoirs_Of_A_Sinner_%281986%29_–_Wojciech_Has.srt
Language(s):Polish
Subtitles:English, French (muxed), English (srt)
A jealous husband out of control, his sexy actress wife, a sleazy Hollywood director, a reckless drug messenger, a disoriented young woman, an ex-con hot dog vendor, a troubled student on a mysterious mission, a high-rise window cleaner on an illicit break, an elderly sketch artist, a hectic paramedics team and a group of hungry nuns. A cross-section of contemporary urbanites whose lives and loves intertwine. They live in an unsure world where anything could happen at any time. An unexpected chain of events can seal many fates in a mere 11 minutes.
Quote:
11 Minutes feels like a roller coaster ride, as our attention moves rapidly amongst the various stories. The film is kinetic, frantic at times, contemplative at others, all in the service of a work that reflects the fragmented nature of our modern world.Piers Handling for TIFF
http://nitroflare.com/view/655FAA0CEF4F408/11.Minutes.2015.DVDRip.x264-pirata00.mkv
Language(s):Polish, English
Subtitles:English(for Polish parts), Polish
Quote:
The Walter Reade Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York City’s retrospective – History Lessons: The Films of Jerzy Kawalerowicz, 30 January to 12 February 2004, screened the major work of this Polish director whose career spanned 50+ years. The programme offered, amidst the veteran’s varied output, a very special, culture vulture/archaeologist’s dream: Pharaoh (aka: Faraon), co-scripted by Kawalerowicz with Tadeusz Konwicki, and based on a novel by Boleslaw Prus. The best cinematic recreation of circa 1100 BC Late New Kingdom Dynastic Egypt ever, photographed on location at authentic sites and environs, the production design, costumes and props were all meticulously researched.
The story, based on actual historic events, concerns an invented ruler Ramses XIII (Jerzy Zelnick) – actually there were 11 Ramses in the archaeological record – plunked into the drama experienced by Ramses XI. While still Crown Prince, handsome, athletically built Ramses yearns to stem the gradual decline of Egypt’s empire and to reform the miserable lives of the huge peasant and labouring classes. Young Ramses’ plans, abiding until his rapidly ailing, aged father Ramses XII’s (Andrej Girtler) death, greatly displease the powerful, numerous sacerdotal caste, particularly its most influential elder, an actual personage – the Sun God Amon-Ra’s high priest Herihor (Pietr Pawlowski), the real, long-term power behind the throne.
Spicing up the political power versus growing, corrupt theoretical influence plot (which really happened), the script adds a romantic element involving Ramses taking as a mistress, Sarah (Krystyna Mikolajewska), a sweet-natured, lovely, naïve Jewish woman. Later, a Phoenician priestess of Astarte, the sultry Kama (Barbara Brylska) gets sent by enemies of the Crown Prince to seduce him, thereby sowing discord in his household. More complications involve threats of war with the Assyrians. Midway through this narrative, the old king dies and the protagonist gets crowned Ramses XIII. His struggle to assert his power brings the conflict with the religious factions into the open, creating tragic consequences building to a shattering, abrupt climax.
The fascinating tale of two vivid, shrewd, utterly opposed personalities vying for power and the intrigues surrounding such efforts, calls for bravura performances and the lead actors and the supporting players deliver. Enhancing all we get dazzling: authentic exteriors and interiors; costumes, props and ornaments – everything expertly photographed by Jerzy Wojcek and complemented by Adam Walacinski’s minimal score recreating the instrumentation of the ancient period. The set decoration and many objects: gorgeous jewellery; furniture; vessels; clothing; weaponry; chariots, etc, directly copy museum pieces or artworks which this armchair archaeologist reviewer gleefully recognised.
Refreshingly far from the usual ridiculous Hollywood kitsch versions of dynastic Egypt, this film still had nits to pick: some grotesquely absurd-looking wigs amidst the accurate ones – a theatrical effect that didn’t work at all. A portrayal of scheming Phoenician and Jewish bankers bordered on caricature but added some needed comic relief. The monarch’s double crown, otherwise the correct shape, here had the red portion done up golden – the gold and white no doubt considered glitzier on screen than the historically proper red and white. At one point, Ramses refers to the 19th Dynasty, an awkward gaff. Egypt’s ancient history didn’t get organised into numbered dynasties until the Hellenistic Greek scholars had analysed texts and structured records well after the Pharaonic era ended. In their life times, Egypt’s pharaohs marked time’s passage by referring to the years of their reigns or those of their predecessors specifically.
The oddest anachronism in this picture was seeing an African civilisation with the prominent personages impersonated by Poles speaking their language. Dark body makeup aside, Polish money financed the organisation of this production and the Poles can be forgiven for putting their own people in the principal roles with locals as extras. Despite such quibbles, Pharaoh’s admirable, almost entirely successful attempt at an authentic depiction of Egypt during the last Ramses’ reign and the social/ political/ spiritual issues of the time, still relevant today, deserves enthusiastic praise. Ideally, all the actors should have been Egyptians, but the Polish thespians acquitted themselves with aplomb and we can hope they inspire indigenous initiated historical cinematic dramas in the future.
This film, the epitome of the next best thing to having a time machine, offering splendid visuals and intelligent presentation of a riveting story – surpasses any other opus dealing with dynastic Egypt. Pharaoh is the one period epic that rules them all!
http://nitroflare.com/view/30BE1E009986543/Jerzy_Kawalerowicz_-_%281966%29_Faraon.mkv
Language(s):Polish
Subtitles:English, French
Quote:
Talented Polish director Agnieszka Holland who would be better known in later years because of her films like Europa, Europa (1991) or some of her American works like Washington Square (1997), hits the mark early and again with this ostensible story about provincial actors in Poland. In reality, the comedy-drama can be read as a commentary on the contemporary Polish scene in politics and society. The story begins as a savvy director arrives in a small town to put on a stage play. His leading man is filled with insecurities and goes beyond the confines of his lead role to expand his part, restore his cut lines, and generally outdo himself while taking on some of everyone else’s job, including the director’s. No one wants to lose him because of his drawing power, and the director is caught in a bind. At the same time, the lead actor’s wife is slowly losing her chances at success, being relegated to a much lesser position in the troupe. This fine comedy won the Fipresci award at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival.
http://nitroflare.com/view/FD054B81471E1BC/Agnieszka_Holland_-_%281979%29_Provincial_Actors.mkv
Language(s):Polish
Subtitles:English
Quote:
In this rich and subtle dream-play, a man arrives in a small country town and demands sanctuary from an unspecified threat. But who is he, why do people remember him differently, and can he really perform miracles? Many Poles consider this Cybulski’s greatest performance and he’s certainly on riveting form, especially when performing a ‘salto’ folk dance towards the end.
http://nitroflare.com/view/443F099C92E1694/Tadeusz_Konwicki_-_%281965%29_Salto.mkv
Language(s):Polish
Subtitles:English, French
Quote:
Apart from the conscience provoking “A Short Film About Killing” I have always found Western European audiences’ adulation of the Polish director, Krzysztof Kieslowski, rather excessive, all the more so when compared to the comparative neglect of Zanussi, that other, to my mind , infinitely greater Krzysztof. During the late ’70’s and early ’80’s he produced a remarkable body of work that, although dealing with rigorous intellectual concepts, perfectly balanced head with heart. In “Night Paths” he examines a contemporary generation’s indifference to history; in “The Contract” he uses the stag as a metaphor for the nobility and strength that, in his view, Polish society fails to aspire to, while in “The Constant Factor” he makes use of mathematics in an attempt to shed light on the awesome possibilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This latter is a multi-layered work, on the one hand dealing with the consequencies of maintaining integrity within a corrupt employment situation and at a deeper level attempting to understand the randomness of fate that mankind is exposed to regardless of political dogmas or individual standards of morality. Witold, the main protagonist of the film, is a young man whose father, a famous mountaineer, has been killed in a climbing accident. He has one objective, to follow in his footsteps by joining a Himalayan expedition. However his failure to come to terms with the corrupt working practises of his colleagues leads to their thwarting his ambition. “The Constant Factor” is without doubt one of the most deeply pessimistic films I know. When I first saw it I could hardly believe the ghastliness of its ending. Even though I consider it to be one of the most profound masterworks of cinema I have to steel myself beforehand whenever I bring myself to sharing it with anyone, let alone seeing it by myself.
http://nitroflare.com/view/3C60E579EE2C742/Krzysztof_Zanussi_-_%281980%29_The_Constant_Factor.mkv
Language(s):Polish, English
Subtitles:English, French
Quote:
Wajda’s remarkable sequel to Man of Marble welds newsreel footage of the Solidarity strike to fiction in a strong investigative drama. A disillusioned, vodka-sodden radio producer is bundled off to Gdansk in a black limousine. His mission: to smear one of the main activists – who also happens to be the son of the hapless ‘Marble’ worker-hero. But, tempered by bitter experience of the failed reforms of ’68 and ’70, these new men of iron are more durable than their fathers, not as easily smashed. Media cynicism, censorship and corruption are again dominant themes, this time anchored through the TV coverage of the strike, though the conclusion hints with guarded optimism at a possible rapprochement between workers and intelligentsia. An urgent, nervy narrative conveys all the exhilaration and bewilderment of finding oneself on the very crestline of crucial historical change; and for the viewer, all the retrospective melancholy of knowing that euphoria shattered by subsequent events.
http://nitroflare.com/view/8BE66DCD2954E18/Andrzej_Wajda_-_%281981%29_Man_of_Iron.mkv
Language(s):Polish
Subtitles:English, French
Quote:
Austeria takes place during the opening days of World War I, in the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia. Tag (Franciszek Pieczka) is a Jewish innkeeper whose inn (austeria means inn in the local Polish dialect) is located near the border with Russia. War has broken out and local civilians are fleeing the advancing Russian Army, and several groups of refugees have taken shelter in Tag’s inn for the night. A group of Hassidic jews from the neighboring village arrive, followed by an Austrian baroness on and a Hungarian hussar cut off from his unit…
http://nitroflare.com/view/4450F34DD2F9702/Jerzy_Kawalerowicz_-_%281982%29_The_Inn.mkv
Language(s):Polish
Subtitles:English, French
Quote:
Polish filmmaker Andrzej Zulawski is best known for his anguished monster flick Possession, which featured Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani as a married couple spiraling toward domestic meltdown. His films are aggressive shrieks of madness, doomed love, trance-state convulsions, and shrieking emotional upheavals. The octopus creature that materializes halfway through Possession, completing the film’s bizarre love triangle, transports a fairly naturalistic, if explosive, kitchen-sink drama into the realm of magical realism; Zulawski swore that his 1981 masterwork was partially autobiographical, coming as it did so soon after a vicious and harrowing divorce.
In a career that was plagued with financial restrictions and bans from the Polish Ministry of Culture, Possession is a more easily accessible and wholly complete reference point for those with a taste for this sort of film. Zulawski himself believed that his would-be cinematic opus On the Silver Globe was a “broken thing,” since his financiers not only shut the film down in the midst of principal photography, but also destroyed his remaining costumes and sets. Based on a series of science-fiction novels written by his great-uncle Jerzy Zulawski entitled The Moon Trilogy (which rivals the philosophical heft of Stanislaw Lem’s work and brings to mind the epic scope of Frank Herbert’s Dune), this might have been a sacrilegious masterpiece about a colonized land where men create new gods in order to have something to believe in.
But the film was never finished, and it wasn’t until the mid 1980s that Zulawski was able to shoot some additional material and piece together the raw footage into this semi-coherent state. For many years, the most readily available copies of On the Silver Globe were pirated versions that could be found in obscure video stores, but even those were missing English subtitles. Those who were able to endure nearly two-and-a-half hours of patched-together footage found the story incredibly difficult to follow; it didn’t help that Zulawski threw in unrelated images of sunsets, cityscapes, and roving shots drifting up and down escalators as his voiceover gave summaries of the scenes or sequences he was never able to film. I hasten to add that even with subtitles, On the Silver Globe remains tough-going at times, what with its large cast of characters, depictions of bizarre interplanetary rituals, and extended trance sequences where characters degenerate into insanity.
The film’s first half involves three astronaut colonists—two male, one female—who become stranded on the dark side of the moon, but are strangely able to breathe and survive if they stay close to water (hauntingly filmed near the Baltic coast and the Crimean banks of the Black Sea). Like Adam and Eve, they produce children of incest who create their own primitive society complete with rival tribe factions and arcane ceremonies that celebrate the oldest surviving spaceman, Jerzy Trela, as a god. The mystical locales, with their grim white sands and melancholic gray-blue skies, set a nightmarish atmosphere, and the wardrobe of pagan headdresses and ornate embroideries are like the gothic fever-dream flipside of the hippie summer of love.
Kicking into an even more feverish gear, a lone astronaut named Marek (Andrzej Seweryn) arrives to gather information on what happened to the original colonies. His ill-fated rescue mission gives way to surrender as the tribes praise him as their champion defender against the monstrous and fascistic winged raven-black creatures that have enslaved them. Imagine Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ set within the post-apocalyptic wreckage zone of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Zulawski’s most notable visuals include desperate pre-war orgies, a crucifixion that lifts the doomed messiah 60 feet into the air, and the camera spiraling up gigantic spikes with victims impaled upon them like savage Medieval offerings. Absurd and extreme, but never morbid, this European shock-cinema offering goes so far overboard in its excess that it becomes a bleak comic spit into the face of organized religion, organized society, and even organized narrative. It’s completely out of control, almost joyfully so, like a child knocking over sandcastles. As Zulawski once said, “The key to unhappiness is to control.”
Zulawski’s movies tackle big ideas, and if Possession is about the aching pain of love, then On the Silver Globe takes raging philosophical bites on the subject of ethical freedom. Zulawski believed we’re all unhappy, creating the image of God so that we can tear it down again, or kill, or fulfill our hungers and be forgiven. Heavy stuff, to be sure, but he expresses his thoughts through primal, kinetic images, with a restless camera shoving its way forward into scenes like a parasite and characters descending into caustic fits of love and hate. His films don’t seem like ponderous intellectual exercises, but highly emotional gut responses—and endlessly fascinating because we just aren’t used to seeing that much spirited, hyperactive, shrieking human feeling on screen at one time. When it’s all over, it feels like you’ve been through a cleansing sweat of tears. Viewers willing to jump into the abyss of Zulawski’s creation are encouraged to buckle their seatbelts and bring their crash helmets, because it’s a wild and bumpy trip down.
http://nitroflare.com/view/3C6003CE739CCB8/Andrzej_Zulawski_-_%281987%29_On_the_Silver_Globe.mkv
Language(s):Polish
Subtitles:English
Quote:
The Ten Commandments, exact and uncompromising, literally cast in stone, continues to provide a source of moral conflict in contemporary society. In the ten part epic masterpiece, Decalogue, Krzysztof Kieslowski examines the dilemma of fundamental sin in the lives of ordinary Warsaw citizens. A scientist (Henryk Baranowski) puts his faith in science and logic to govern daily life (Decalogue I). A violinist (Krystyna Janda), unable to decide between her husband and her lover, defers the impossible decision to her husband’s attending physician (Aleksander Bardini) (Decalogue II). A lonely woman (Maria Pakulnis) imposes on an ex-lover (Daniel Olbrychski) on Christmas Eve to search for her missing lover (Decalogue III). An acting student (Adrianna Biedrzynska) discovers an ominous letter from her father (Janusz Gajos) (Decalogue IV).A cruel young man (Miroslaw Baka) wanders through the streets in search of a random victim (Decalogue V). A young postal clerk (Olaf Linde Lubaszenko) falls in love with a neighboring artist (Grazyna Szapolowska) whom he admires from a distance (Decalogue VI). A struggling student (Maja Barelkowska) kidnaps her biological daughter (Katarzyna Piwowarczyk) (Decalogue VII). An ethics professor (Maria Koscialkowska) is confronted with the culpability of her actions when asked to harbor a Jewish girl during World War II (Decalogue VIII). A married couple (Piotr Machalica and Ewa Blaszczyk) learn to deal with the husband’s impotence (Decalogue IX). Two brothers (Zbigniew Zamachowski and Jerzy Stuhr) inherit their father’s priceless stamp collection (Decalogue X).
Defined as Kieslowski’s experimental, transitional work for Polish television, Decalogue is, in itself, a monumental achievement: a remarkable examination of moral tale colliding, and often yielding, against the bounds of human frailty. Kieslowski crafts each episode with a distinctive signature, creating serenely indelible, spare, and poetic imagery: the dripping of candle wax against the icon of the Virgin Mary in Decalogue I; the point source lighting of Decalogue IV; the raw, monochromatic presentation (using sepia overlay) of Decalogue V; the saturation of colors in Decalogue VI; the perversion of physical exercise as self-punishment in Decalogue IX. Throughout the film, a ubiquitous, enigmatic man serves as a silent witness to the moral fissure, but remains uninvolved – a chronicler of humanity, an omniscient presence who does not pass judgment. Invariably, Decalogue proves to be a testament for the venerable director as well, a profound observation on the trials and tribulations of everyday life, reflected in complex ways – direct and abstruse – but all fundamentally, and infallibly, human.
http://nitroflare.com/view/D3448B7DEEB9704/Dekalog_I.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/1402595653461C8/Dekalog_II.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/37E923B578D1705/Dekalog_III.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/0F73AEAB0D0FEB9/Dekalog_IV.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/3502B4652461E90/Dekalog_V.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/4ECE4EDC077FB23/Dekalog_VI.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/940EA6E851922A8/Dekalog_VII.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/C894575FF721FC2/Dekalog_VIII.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/14F8CE3AAC1F809/Dekalog_XIX.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/88663CDB7FA3307/Dekalog_X.mkv
Language(s):Polish
Subtitles:English
Quote:
There is something vaguely mythical to the manner in which Konwicki introduces his characters, both to us and to each other, lapped as much by the ethereal eeriness of the score as by the seaside winds that send their hair aflutter. When they tend to speak to each other in whispers, it seems almost out of respect for the otherworldly aura of their locale, as though it is to their eyes as improbably beautiful as Konwicki’s camera renders it to us. They—referred to in the credits only as “He” and “She”, mysterious and mythical in themselves—do not whisper much; there’s a clear silent heritage at work here, conferring meaning to the motion of faces and the movement of the camera along this spectral shore.
A literal landscape this certainly is not; as much as the spiritual sensibility of the piece, Konwicki’s framing foregrounds an allegorical interpretation of all we see. “This is the place for wearied people,” says He with a certain resignation that’s sure to set him among them, “people who don’t want to win or lose.” Like the clouds that accrue above, Poland’s terrible wartime fare casts a foreboding shadow that’s impossible to ignore, especially given the distant drone of planes overhead heard at the beginning and end of the film. Explicit references are avoided, much as they might be inferred; while the war offers an easy answer to the sense of malaise on which the movie’s mood is predicated, it’s as effective an embodiment of any kind of terrible, lingering trauma.
http://nitroflare.com/view/B37A1DF555EC8CB/Tadeusz_Konwicki_-_%281958%29_The_Last_Day_of_Summer.mkv
Language(s):Polish
Subtitles:English, French
Quote:
Unanimous winner of all three main prizes at the 1973 Locarno International Film Festival, Zanussi’s landmark film is a dazzling kaleidoscope of ideas and images. Illumination explores the life of a selfabsorbed young physicist trying to understand his place in the universe. He thinks science will provide the answers, but ultimately learns far more about himself through experiencing love, betrayal, loss, and facing his own mortality. As much a philosophical essay as a narrative feature, Illumination is a cinematic mosaic combining art and science, intellect and emotion. Innovatively structured, this unflinching examination of one man’s life became an iconic cultural marker for a whole generation.
http://nitroflare.com/view/F7AC57FECDE71C8/Krzysztof_Zanussi_-_%281973%29_Illumination.mkv
Language(s):Polish
Subtitles:English, French
Quote:
Jerzy Skolimowski’s second feature (and first full-length narrative) cemented his status as a one-man Polish New Wave, with the rhythms of his films influenced as much by jazz and (his own) poetry as by more conventional storytelling. Skolimowski himself plays a dropout-turned-amateur boxer who’s distracted from his bouts when Teresa (Aleksandra Zawieruszanka), an old university friend, re-enters his life.
http://nitroflare.com/view/092AA21E81FA236/Jerzy_Skolimowski_-_%281965%29_Walkover.mkv
Language(s):Polish
Subtitles:English, French
Quote:
Two strangers, Jerzy (Leon Niemczyk) and Marta (Lucyna Winnicka), accidentally end up holding tickets for the same sleeping chamber on an overnight train to the Baltic Sea coast. While handsome, well dressed and rather laconic, Jerzy seems ill at ease, while Marta is not talkative and would prefer to be alone. Staszek (Zbigniew Cybulski) is a student and Marta’s spurned lover, and will not leave her alone. When the police enter the train in search of a murderer on the lam, rumors fly and everything seems to point toward one of the main characters as the culprit. [spoiler removed from quote]
This is a more amorphous and ambiguous tale than other contemporary films of the Polish School, and Night Train seems to lack the direct references to recent history and the contemporary political situation of the Poland of the 1950s that are a hallmark of the style. However, the Hitchcockian atmosphere, the unimaginably tight shots and the overall sense of claustrophobia and dread evoke the sense of disappointment following in the wake of 1956 and the end of the ‘Polish Spring’. All of Kawalerowicz’s films deal with individual fate in a society being crushed by overwhelming external forces, whether war or politics, in an attempt to examine moral choice under pressure. Night Train is no exception, only here he has created an allegory of misfits among a society of passengers, a society that is predictable, suspicious of individuality, and eager to punish. All of Poland escaping though the night to the end of the line. Ironically, the film may represent in its way the end of the Polish School as well.
http://nitroflare.com/view/1A9FB436BE69DF2/Jerzy_Kawalerowicz_-_%281959%29_Night_Train.mkv
Language(s):Polish
Subtitles:English, French
The depiction of the life of Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of Poland’s Solidarity movement, Lech Walesa, as events in the 1970s lead to a peaceful revolution.
Quote:
Wałęsa, an electrician at the Gdańsk Shipyards, participated in local demonstrations during the 1970s. Following the bloody aftermath, which remains with Wałęsa, he concentrates on his day-to-day duties. Ten years later, a new uprising occurs and he becomes an unexpected and charismatic leader of Polish dockworkers.
Wałęsa’s leadership role signified the beginning of a new movement that successfully overcame the communist regime of the period, and Wałęsa is pushed into representing the majority of Poland’s population. The Soviet Union, previously regarded as too powerful to confront, eventually grants the movement a degree of acceptance. The Polish example of solidarity then caused a domino effect throughout Eastern Europe: people in Eastern Germany followed the Polish example, starting demonstrations for freedom that achieved the German reunification peacefully. The Soviet Union then dissolved alongside Yugoslavia.
While Europe is reshaped, Poland remains stable and peaceful. Yet a huge variety of political parties unfolds and Poland is on the brink of becoming as ungovernable as the late Weimar Republic. Wałęsa is subsequently elected as the first president of the new Polish democracy; but, this is followed by feelings of resentment among the Polish people who start to think that Wałęsa is becoming privileged. Consequently, the Polish people start to seek out ways to diminish Wałęsa’s significance, until they finally accomplish their goal through uncovering actions from a past period.
Language(s):Polish, Italian
Subtitles:English (Hardcoded)
Quote:
An obscured thief breaks into a school gymnasium at night to steal a portable telescope from the science lab. On the following morning, the thief, Tomek (Olaf Lubaszenko) sets up the telescope on his desk, facing the window of his room, and across the courtyard into an adjacent apartment. Later in the day, an attractive, hurried woman named Magda (Grazyna Szapolowska) stops by the post office in order to claim a money order after receiving a notification in her mailbox, only to be informed by the attentive young postal clerk, Tomek, that there is nothing being held at the station on her behalf. Back home, Tomek sets his alarm clock to 8:00 pm, the approximate time of Magda’s return home. Tomek would prepare his meals and dine in the privacy of his room, away from the curious gaze of his godmother (Stefania Iwinska), and spend hours observing Magda as she goes through the routine of her household tasks, often placing anonymous, silent telephone calls to hear the sound of her voice.However, his cursorily voyeuristic behavior towards Magda seems incongruously devoid of sexual connotation, as Tomek discreetly looks away from the all-too-frequent occasions when she brings home a lover, or attempts to sabotage her liaisons by dispatching interruptive repair service calls to her apartment. Painfully self-conscious and unable to express his affection for the uninhibited Magda, Tomek persists in his pathetic and reprehensible surveillance until one day when his overplayed false notification ruse results in an acrimonious altercation with the unwitting, skeptical postmaster.
An expanded, feature-length re-working of Decalogue VI: Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s magnum opus television project, Decalogue, A Short Film About Love is a sublime and provocative exploration on the nature of desire, connection, and intimacy. Interplaying colors of red and white, Kieslowski uses conventional visual symbols to convey the ideals of purity and love: the fragmented shot of a surgically bandaged hand; Tomek’s reckless game of chance (which he performs over a piece of red cloth used to cover the telescope) that cuts to Magda as she traces figures over the spilled milk on her kitchen table; the painted glass block wall near the entrance of Magda’s apartment that visually frames Tomek during his deliveries; the image of blood against a ceramic sink. Moreover, Kieslowski’s allusive use of thematic colors in his subsequent films, Three Colors: White and Three Colors: Red, to represent equality (White) and fraternity (Red), is similarly manifested in the film as Tomek reaches a figurative equality with Magda after the transformative, humiliating encounter, and Magda (whose birth name, uncoincidentally, is Maria Magdalena) finds redemption from her wanton past through her connection with Tomek. In the haunting final sequence that markedly diverges from the resigned and disaffected conclusion of Decalogue VI, Magda is able to look through a metaphoric window into her own calloused, world-weary soul, and is provided with a glimpse of humanity that still remains intact.
Language(s):Polish
Subtitles:English
Quote:
Death from the very beginning — a rat decomposing in the water, a cat hanging from a railing as giggling children run off. In Krzysztof Kieslowski’s expansion of the Decalogue: Five segment (“Thou shalt not kill”), the commandment bounds individual and governmental killing into one object of anguished contemplation. Biblical intimations also figure in the bar exam summation (“Since Cain, no punishment has been capable of improving the world”) of apprentice attorney Krzysztof Globisz, one of the three Warsaw dwellers whose path ominously converge; the others are a 20-year-old drifter (Miroslaw Baka) and a jaundiced, middle-aged cabbie (Jan Tesarz). The obscured-vision effects of Slawomir Idziak’s dirty-sepia filters — characters encircled by soiling irises — suggest isolated realities clashing appallingly in the most excruciating murder since Torn Curtain’s farmhouse killing: a mid-ride throttling, Tesarz’s writhing foot emerging bare from shoe and sock, a heavy body dragged through an almost Tarkovskyan marsh before the final bludgeoning at Bakas hand’s.Kieslowski skips over the investigation for the guilty verdict, the better to focus on the defeated lawyer’s impotent despair as the young killer awaits the sentence to be carried out. The first half is random details and deliberate choices, a sack falling from above and a devil’s head dangling from a rearview mirror, a hooligan pondering whether to throw a rock onto a busy highway and picking one cream puff over another. The second half is implacable fate, precipitated by the past (an angelic photograph points to a pastoral, lost) and streamlined with state-execution efficiency, the reflection of the driver’s murder located in Baka’s no less protracted hanging. Globisz’ optimism crumbles in the face of humanity’s potential for brutality, but for Kieslowski a moral revival, much needed for modern Poland (and, in the view of interconnectedness, the whole world), must alarm before it can humble. “You’ve aged quite a bit today,” the prosecutor tells him.
Language(s):Polish
Subtitles:English
Synopsis:
Angelo and Kasia met in Italy in a Focolari prayer group and were brought together by love and faith in God. Their relationship is interrupted by the young woman’s return to Poland and her decision to become a nun. Angelo comes to Warsaw to persuade Kasia to change her mind. Waiting for her decision, he gets a job at a multinational corporation. The company is run by a ruthless and cynical woman, Kris. In the corporate reality the deeply religious Angelo falls victim to mockery and mobbing. Using her power, Kris toys with him and wants to force him to violate his moral principles, while being fascinated by his faith at the same time.
Review:
Legendary Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi is back with his first narrative feature in five years, and it’s a doozy. The story of a man caught between two women—his virtuous love, who has decided to become a nun; and his nihilistic boss, who has decided to corrupt him. The performances are uniformly excellent, cinematography alternates between rich darkness and bright light, as befitting the duality of the subject matter, and the score is absolutely haunting. At times the film even recalls the best work of Zanussi’s other longtime and dearly departed friend, fellow Polish master Krzysztof Kieslowski.
— The Best Movies at TIFF 2014 [Michael Dunaway]
http://nitroflare.com/view/D41FC977D516E93/Foreign_Body_%28Obce_cialo%29_%282014%29_–_Krzysztof_Zanussi.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/01EBED5A041B93F/Foreign_Body_%28Obce_cialo%29_%282014%29_–_Krzysztof_Zanussi.srt
https://uploadgig.com/file/download/034B87004f18ae9a/Foreign Body Obce cialo 2014 — Krzysztof Zanussi.mkv
https://uploadgig.com/file/download/295b1D138A05f79a/Foreign Body Obce cialo 2014 — Krzysztof Zanussi.srt
Language(s):Polish
Subtitles:English, Polish, French (muxed), English (srt)
Quote:
Two women, one house. An intimate story about a Pole and a German placed by war on enemy sides and their parallel lives accidentally brought together.
The film reflects on the concepts of invaders, victim, guilt and forgiveness. It confronts different experiences and their paradoxical similarities. It deals with the controversial subject of the post-war accountings.
The visual narration is flowing, guided by memories and archives. Traditional documentation confronts experimental use of archival footage in the cinematic impression about displacement.
“This is both a very personal film and the story of thousands of people whose world crumbled due the war. It is very rare in cinema that one finds such an exquisite combination of sensitivityand formal discipline. I found the gentleness of this film moving.” Marcel Łoziński, director
“My House Without Me is one of the most promising cinema debuts of recent years. Writer-director Magdalena Szymków’s name should go straight into every cinephile’s notebook. Her strikingly mature and quietly assured film interviews two elderly women about the house in
which both have lived, examining the upheavals and ironies of occupation and displacement. Experimentally processed archive footage adds a haunting extra dimension to this searching, spellbinding exploration of history’s paradoxes.” — Neil Young, Bradford International Film Festival
Awards wrote:
Krakow Film Festival, Krakow, Poland (2012) – Best Film Editing Award
Festival of Migrant Film, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2013) , Best Short Film Award
International Festival of Film Producers REGIOFUN, Katowice, Poland (2012) – Best Short Film Award
Solanin Film Festival, Nowa Sól, Poland (2012) – Grand Prix
Solanin Film Festival, Nowa Sól, Poland (2012) – Best Professional Film Award
Women in Film and Television, WOW Film Festival, Sydney, Australia (2014) – Best International Documenatry
Women in Film and Television, WOW Film Festival, Sydney, Australia (2014) – Audience Award
Rochester IFF, NY, USA (2014) – Honorable Mention
http://nitroflare.com/view/F4F31002BC58202/My_House_Without_Me.mkv
http://uploadgig.com/file/download/41a22aaFc4F079E5/My House Without Me.mkv
Language(s):Polish, German
Subtitles:English (hardcoded)
