POLISH FILMS SUCCEDED IN WIESBADEN
11. Festival of Central and Eastern European Film goEast in Wiesbaden ended with fourfold successes of Polish filmmakers! There were three Polish names listed among the winners - Piotr Stasik, our documentary representative in the competition, as well as Igor Chojna, awarded two prizes for his short fiction and animated film director Paweł Kryszak.
During the ending ceremony of the 11. goEast Festival Piotr Stasik, director of “The Last Day of Summer”, was awarded the Documentary Award “Remembrance and Future” donated by the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” which honours exceptional documentaries exploring the past of their country of origin and marking out new perspectives and directions for the future.
This is the second such an important prize for “The Last Day of Summer”. At last year’s Plus Camerimage Festival in Poland the film was awarded the Golden Frog in recognition of its “sensitively observed and composed cinematography, for its consistency of style and tone, and the intimacy with which the camera approaches its subject matter”.
Piotr Stasik about his film:
“Two years ago, while visiting my parents' house in the country, I was looking for a book to read. Instead, I found my old journals. I was surprised to discover that the earliest were written when I was 8. Two weeks later, I was in Penza, 700 kilometres outside of Moscow. Provincial Russia looked exactly like Poland 20 years ago, and I had the feeling as if I had found myself back in my childhood days. By accident, I ended up in a cadet school. I saw boys marching in line, all dressed in military uniforms. The youngest were 7, the oldest 17. Finding my journals and the visit to the school transported me back into my childhood, and I decided to make a movie about this. Out of 400 cadets, I chose 5 to be the protagonists of my film. The youngest is 8, the oldest is 17. In each of them, I saw a fragment of myself from all those years ago. I observed their ordinary days with my camera. The resulting movie is on the one hand a journey into the childhood days, and on the other - a tale about the hardships of modern Russia. When does our childhood end? How does this process follow? Is it necessary? What do we lose when we become adults?”
More at the websites:
www.centralafilm.pl
www.filmfestival-goeast.de