POLISH PROJECT AT THE CPH:FORUM
The list of all projects qualified for this year's edition of the CPH:FORUM has already been announced. Among the 39 selected entries, there is also a Polish project by Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosołowski.
CPH:FORUM is an event which accompanies the festival CPH:DOX, held in Copenhagen. Every year, about 40 projects are accepted in several categories, this year, they are Art, Cinema, F:Act, Fictiononfiction, Science and WIP.
Not only documentary and feature filmmakers apply for the CHP:FORUM, but also journalists, activists and visual artists looking for financial support and for partners on the international market. Each production company can submit at most two projects at the development stage or at an early stage of production.
"The Hamlet Syndrome" is a Polish project by Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosołowski.
"Children of the revolution, naive rebels, dreamers brutally awakened from their dreams," this is how Roza Sarkisian describes her generation. She is a young Ukrainian theatre director, preparing a documentary performance in which she would like to portray the generation of contemporary Hamlets of her country. This unique theatre staging, uniting authentic characters and Shakespearian classics on stage, is the starting point for creating a documentary film portraying "the generation of the Maidan," that is, the generation of the young people whose life completely changed its course as the result of the Ukrainian "Revolution of Dignity" of 2014. However, it will not be simply a galaxy of heroes. People representing diverse political and social views will meet on stage. Not each of them had supported the Ukrainian revolution, and today, many of them are disappointed with its fruits. However, what is significant is that for all of them, regardless of which values they represent, recent years have been a series of shocking experiences which brutally left a mark on their psyche. Thus, the theatre stage becomes a neutral ground for collective reckoning. The protagonists were confronted with a brutal political fight and war in eastern Ukraine, and the differences in their moral choices often divided their families and caused conflicts. It is the overwhelming feeling of internal conflict, confusion and untimely confrontation with death which was called by the director of the performance "the Hamlet syndrome."
Each of the film's protagonists suffers from a clinical case of this disease: OLESIA escaped from the conflict-struck Donbas, losing her mother, SLAVIK went through the worst hell of war as a volunteer, OKSANA would simply like to forget and leave, and ROMAN, a former military orderly, is still struggling with dreams in which he is haunted by the ghosts of soldiers whom he had not managed to save. For all of them, the theatre stage is a tribune from which they can shout out their grief and problems, and Hamlet's question, "to be or not to be" becomes a current dilemma in their lives. Preparations and rehearsals for the play by Roza Sarkisian, combined with intensive immersion in the characters' lives, will create a pulsating portrait of the young Ukrainian generation who, facing their own trauma, wants to order their lives and repair the country, torn by constant conflicts.
Polish project is included in the section Cinema.
This year's edition of the CPH:FORUM is held from the 24th to the 26th of March.
The list of all qualified titles can be found here.