Florence November 30th – December 7th 2013

International documentary film festival

  • 100 lat w kinie
    A Hundred Years of Cinema

    Poland/France/Netherlands/United Kingdom 1995 62'
    Directed by: Paweł Łozinski
    One hundred years of Polish film history from the point of view of those who were there as viewers. An ideal intimate journal under cinematic form that overlooks official history and celebrities, and focuses on history as participation, in terms of memories and emotions. The result is an absorbing work filled with curiosities that explores how film contributes to build collective identity and memory.

    2013 Wednesday, December 4th, Spazio Alfieri, 10:15 pm

  • 89mm od Europy
    89mm from Europe

    Poland 1993 12'
    Directed by: Marcel Łozinski
    Trains travel on 1435 mm-wide rails in Europe, whereas the rails all over the territory of the former Soviet Union are 1524 mm wide. The difference measures 89 mm. M. Łozinski places his camera in the exchange station where the undercarriages are adjusted to the differing measures of the rails: this stretch of the border where the separation of two regions is a material, technical issue is both a break point and a
    joining link.

    2013 Tuesday, December 3rd, Spazio Alfieri, 6:30 pm

  • A gdyby tak sie stało
    If It Happens

    Poland 2007 40'
    Directed by: Marcel Łozinski
    Twelve years later Anything Can Happen (Wszystko moze sie przytrafic), Tomek goes back to the same park, in the same places, in the same paths where as a child he was running at breakneck speed. The previous film fits into this next chapter as a long flashback, until, as if by magic, a dialogue begins between Tomek and the child he was. The different gazes of the protagonist filmed over the time meet and overlap. M. Łozinski uses the documentary techniques to tell us a fairy tale.

    2013 Monday, December 2nd, Spazio Alfieri, 7:00 pm

  • Between the Doors

    Austria 2004 25'
    Directed by: Paweł Łozinski
    Episode of the collective project Über die Grenze (Across the Border), the film takes place at the border between Germany and Poland, that during different historical periods was a place of conflict and strife. Forced by the Russians to leave their home to go into what was once part of the German territory, the inhabitants have made of this suspended life a shared memory. In a landscape of great beauty and poetry, this memory emerges thanks to the memories that the protagonists tell the filmmaker.

    2013 Wednesday, December 4th, Spazio Alfieri, 4:30 pm

  • Chemia
    Chemo

    Poland 2009 58'
    Directed by: Paweł Łozinski
    One of the characters says: “Everybody has had flu sometime, the difference is that ours is terribly complicated.” This paradoxical sentence may reveal the meaning of this both intimate and passionate film that is filled with life and hope. In the background, a hospital ward where chemotherapy sessions are performed, in the foreground the chatting patients who get their story across, and thus show their attachment to life.

    2013 Saturday, December 7th, Spazio Alfieri, 3:00 pm

  • Cwiczenia warsztatowe
    Practice Exercises

    Poland 1984 12'
    Directed by: Marcel Łozinski
    As if they were doing a film exercise, a crew of young filmmakers walks down the streets of Warsaw and realizes a few interviews. The film shows a first set of interviews the way they were actually realised. A second set is shown but the people is now answering in the opposite way as they did earlier. A second version of the “document” is thus presented that reverses the first. Partly essay, partly punk experiment, partly comic sketch, this film should be viewed in the context of the crucial, wild decade of the 80’s in Poland.

    2013 Wednesday, December 4th, Spazio Alfieri 3:00 pm

  • Dotkniecie
    The Touch

    Poland 1978 12'
    Directed by: Marcel Łozinski
    The “touch” belongs to a healer who came to Poland from far away. He only speaks and understands English, and he is welcomed at the airport like a celebrity, or some VIP. His destination, though, is not a film set, or a theatre, or a TV station. In the courtyard of a nondescript building, hundreds of people in a queue have been waiting for him for a whole day of hope and expectation, to be cured.

    2013 Monday, December 2nd, Spazio Alfieri, 7:00 pm

  • Egzamin dojrzałosci
    Matriculation

    Poland 1978 17'
    Directed by: Marcel Łozinski
    Which is the best point of view to discuss and describe the Polish educational system? At the turn of the 1970’s, M. Łozinski chose to be like an invisible eye among the young students who were about to take their school-leaving examination. He recorded comments and accounts in-between the exams, students sharing their projects and expectations, interviews with the professors, political and institutional questions, and embarrassed, amused, uncertain answers.

    2013 Monday, December 1st, Spazio Alfieri, 7:00 pm

  • Happy End

    Poland 1973 17'
    Directed by: Marcel Łozinski, Paweł Kedzierski
    A crowded room. What looked like a works council later takes on the overtones of a union meeting and at last those of a jury trial. M. Łozinski exploited the device of psychodrama weaving in the film some fine, profound criticism of the dictatorship of bureaucracy and of a system – the People’s Republic of Poland – that turns representation into a tool for supremacy and control.

    2013 Wednesday, December 4th, Spazio Alfieri, 3:00 pm

  • Inventory
    Inwentaryzacja

    Poland 2010 9'
    Directed by: Paweł Łozinski
    The painstaking work of a group of archaeologists on some tombstones and inscriptions covered with vegetation and the dust of time. The frame gradually is enlarged and these minimal gestures acquire meaning; the stones become part of a story, vegetation of a context. Past and present, here and elsewhere, nearby and faraway, drama and daily life are separated by a thin line that the cinema illusorily seems to cross.

    2013 Friday, December 6th, Spazio Alfieri, 3:00 pm

  • Jak to sie robi
    How It Is Done

    Poland 2006 88'
    Directed by: Marcel Łozinski
    The title could sound as both a question and an answer, because the film is the analytic result of a lengthy, thorough observation of one of the darkest areas of any western, democratic society: the dynamics that run the process of selection of the ruling class. M. Łozinski proves the consistence, but also the evolution, of his working method: he updates an approach that was tailored to expose how propaganda worked in the People’s Republic of Poland, but can still very well cope, after forty years, with the dictatorship of communication.

    2013 Tuesday, December 3rd, Spazio Alfieri, 3:00 pm

  • Jak zyc‘
    How to Live

    Poland 1977 83'
    Directed by: Marcel Łozinski
    In a summer camp organized by the Union of Young Polish Socialists (ZSMP), an ad-hoc people’s committee is in charge of a painstaking, relentless task: assess and scrutinize all participants, assign votes, penalties, and the final prize to the winning “model family”. M. Łozinski’s documentary overlaps with the device planned by an Institution: this way, film breaks down and recomposes the device itself into a story that reverses its original meaning.

    2013 Thursday, December 5th, Spazio Alfieri, 3:00

  • Kici, Kici
    Kitty, Kitty

    Poland 2008 27'
    Directed by: Paweł Łozinski
    Kitty, Kitty is a portrait in four seasons of four different women who share a passion. Night and day, in their fur or worn-out clothes, the ladies never miss the opportunity to take care of “their” stray cats and thus find an answer to their loneliness. Once again, P. Łozinski directs his gaze onto the “other side of the street” and finds out apparently non-meaningful lives that are elevated to a metaphor of contemporary living.

    2013 Saturday, December 7th, Spazio Alfieri, 3:00 pm

  • Król
    The King

    Poland 1974 15'
    Directed by: Marcel Łozinski
    Quiet. After a while, some voice over begins to tell the story of someone’s life. Suddenly, we are outside: the camera explores the open space, noise of wind, steps, music, but this lasts for a few seconds. The voice keeps on, bathed in silence. In this concise portrait, M. Łozinski cuts down the variety of materials. He experiments with the primary elements of film language and aesthetics.

    2013 Thursday, December 5th, Spazio Alfieri, 3:00 pm

  • Las katynski
    Katyn Forest

    Poland/France 1990 53'
    Directed by: Marcel Łozinski
    After the invasion of Poland by the Soviet Union in 1939, Stalinist police locked up in the prison camps of Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostaszkow about 15,000 people, mostly officers of the Polish Army. In April 1943 in the forests of Katyn, near Smolensk, the first mass graves were discovered. In the film we cross the forest led by the daughter of one of the Polish officers killed.
    Monday, December 2nd, Spazio Alfieri, 3:00 pm

    2013 Monday, December 2nd, Spazio Alfieri, 3:00 pm

  • Miejsce urodzenia
    Birthplace

    Poland 1992 47'
    Directed by: Paweł Łozinski
    Writer Henryk Grynberg comes from the US back to the village where he and his Jewish family sought shelter during the Nazi occupation and his father, was killed. All the village inhabitants are involved in this still unsolved mystery and unconfessed truth. This film is intriguing, relentless, however filled with humanity. An investigative journey into Poland’s collective guilt at the time of the Holocaust.

    2013 Thursday, December 5th, Spazio Alfieri, 5:00 pm

  • Moj spis z natury we wsi Lezno Małe
    My Nature Index in the Lezno Village

    Poland 2003 24'
    Directed by: Paweł Łozinski
    A Leszno Małe, un piccolo villaggio del nord della Polonia, arrivano gli addetti al censimento per distribuire i moduli da compilare. P. Łozinski li accompagna con una videocamera e una riserva di domande che sfuggono ai numeri della statistica. Dalla descrizione de fenomeni collettivi si passa così all’attenzione alle vite dei singoli, per tornare ad occuparsi dei problemi condivisi. Un film per la televisione che è un ritratto di un mondo contadino in difficoltà ma ancora orgoglioso e indomito.

    2013 Thursday, December 5th, Spazio Alfieri, 5:00 pm

  • Moje miejsce
    My Place

    Poland 1985 17'
    Directed by: Marcel Łozinski
    The camera follows the employees in a big hotel. M. Łozinski dismantles the hotel’s huge production process, bit by bit, shooting from the boiler room up to the manager’s office, including the kitchens, the laundry room, the cloakroom, and the guest rooms. The stoker fuelling the boiler, the scullion, the cook, the barmaid, the doorkeeper, and the hotel manager, everyone belongs in this small, tidy universe. Everyone is tied to the same, primeval condition of existence: working.

    2013 Wednesday, December 4th, Spazio Alfieri, 3:00 pm

  • Ojciec i syn
    Father and Son

    Poland 2013 54'
    Directed by: Paweł Łozinski
    An RV, a destination – Paris – and a set of contrasting expectations. Rather than a holiday, acceptance of risk: leave and rely on the other, without plans or safety nets. Marcel is excited about going back to the place of his childhood, whereas Paweł is thrilled by the idea of being together with his father, and ask him questions he has been keeping for a long time. All love includes thorns and wounds,ì and Paweł’s version of the film exposes them all.

    2013 Saturday, December 7th, Odeon, 5:30 pm

  • Pani Z Ukrainy
    The Ukrainian Cleaning Lady

    Poland 1999 58'
    Directed by: Paweł Łozinski
    Hope and disappointment, teardrops and smiles, old songs and difficult stories. All this blends into the story of a Ukrainian woman who came to Poland in search of a better life for her daughter and herself, and ended up cooking, ironing, and cleaning the house of the film director who decided to film her. A sincere intimacy is thus created to reconstruct the journey that turned a woman into an immigrant, a person with her own past and her own story into someone at the service of someone else.

    2013 Friday, December 6th, Spazio Alfieri, 3:00 pm

  • Poste restante

    Poland 2008 15'
    Directed by: Marcel Łozinski
    This little short stands out among the recent works by M. Łozinski. Poste restante combines two themes that recur in his filmography: observation and breakdown of some production process, along with the openness to the enchantment and wonder that are usually to be found in fairy tales. The film’s circular structure opens and closes with some camera movement that scans a warehouse of paper for pulping. In-between lies the long journey of a letter that will never be delivered: a letter addressed to God.

    2013 Monday, December 2nd, Spazio Alfieri, 7:00 pm

  • Próba mikrofonu
    The Microphone Test

    Poland 1980 19'
    Directed by: Marcel Łozinski
    The microphone is tested, the music launched, and the radio of the Pollena-Uroda cosmetics factory begins broadcasting. M. Łozinski records, gives shape to, and juxtaposes two processes: on one hand, the process/device of the radio survey, on the other hand, an inquisitive meeting in charge of deciding if the 8 hours of the show recorded can actually be broadcast.

    2013 Monday, December 2nd, Spazio Alfieri, 3:00 pm

  • Siedmiu Żydów z mojej klasy
    Seven Jews from My Class

    Poland 1992 40'
    Directed by: Marcel Łozinski
    The director meets with seven classmates who had to leave Poland because of the 1968 anti-Semitic witch-hunt.

    2013 Sunday, December 1st, Spazio Alfieri, 7:00 pm

  • Siostry
    Sisters

    Poland 1999 12'
    Directed by: Paweł Łozinski
    Two elderly sisters bound by a strong tie, which has not been worn by the hardship of life. One talks, the other nods but would rather leave. Beyond the words, a story of domination and subordination is outlined. P. Łozinski gives us an essay on the cinema of small things and transforms a plain chat in an investigation into the ambiguous nature of ties, loneliness, and time.

    2013 Friday, December 6th, Spazio Alfieri, 3:00 pm

  • Sławomir Mrozek przedstawia
    Sławomir Mrozek Presents

    Poland 1997 48'
    Directed by: Paweł Łozinski
    An important Polish writer, playwright, and caricaturist has taken refuge in Mexico for a few years to escape family, the State, success, and ultimately himself. The film-maker decided to film the moment when the writer is about to come back to his Motherland. The occasion will turn into a psychological portrait of an intellectual who has witnessed the most important changes in Poland over the past 30 years.

    2013 Wednesday, December 4th, Spazio Alfieri, 4:30 pm

  • Struktura
    Structure

    Poland 1989 6'
    Directed by: Paweł Łozinski
    The protagonist is a man devoted to the care and maintenance of a “structure”, i.e., the penitentiary he directs but also the system of power in which he’s set as well as its scaffold – a system of thought and of values. He is a man who is concerned with maintaining order and conventions, the most important factor of social cohesion. No “j’accuse” to be found in this film, no moral, just an incredible capacity of perceiving the machinery of power and structure at work in an individual.

    2013 Wednesday, December 4th, Spazio Alfieri, 4:30 pm

  • Swiadkowie / Témoins
    Witnesses

    Poland/France 1986 26'
    Directed by: Marcel Łozinski
    On July 4th, 1946, the crowd in Kielce, Poland, slaughtered forty-two Jews. Forty years later, in 1987, M. Łozinski visited those places and met some witnesses of the carnage. During the interviews with his white-haired interlocutors, he doesn’t seem to be interested in a detailed reconstruction of the individual episode of violence. He is more keen on little anecdotes, details, rumours, gossip, personal opinions and shared, implicit clichés, the scattered fragments of a big picture that actually presents anti-Semitism as everything but accidental and unforeseeable.

    2013 Monday, December 2nd, Spazio Alfieri, 3:00 pm

  • Taka Historia
    The Way It Is

    Poland 1999 58'
    Directed by: Paweł Łozinski
    Like in a play by Beckett, Wiesio and Zdizslaw cling to each other like a crutch that helps them from falling. The film-maker immersed himself in these marginal, apparently worthless lives that are actually processing their losses, constantly searching for love, or some way to survive. A film based on a trusting relationship and intimacy with the subjects as well as a non-judgmental approach, devoid of any moralism: “The Way It is”, simply.

    2013 Friday, December 6th, Spazio Alfieri, 3:00 pm

  • Tonia i jej dzieci
    Tonia and Her Children

    Poland 2011 57'
    Directed by: Marcel Łozinski
    Three people sitting at a table in a room. A heap of letters, pictures, and other documents lie in disorder on the table; in the background, the flicker of a computer monitor. Wera and Marcel are the now old children of Tonja Lechtman, a Jew and a pre-WWII communist. She was arrested in 1949 in the charge of being a spy (for the Americans). The third person is M. Łozinski, the film director, but also long-time friend of the other two, and a witness involved in the story that they are trying to reconstruct.

    2013 Monday, December 2nd, Spazio Alfieri, 10:30 pm

  • Wizyta
    The Visit

    Poland 1974 15'
    Directed by: Marcel Łozinski
    A journalist and a photo-reporter tread on paths winding through farms, fields, and stables in search of a young woman farmer who lives alone with her old mother. M. Łozinski reflects on his work as documentary film-maker and story-teller, but – possibly for the first time – with this short film he virtually shifts the focus onto the margins of official representation, the countryside, letting the city, the modern country slip away, off screen.

    2013 Sunday, December 1st, Spazio Alfieri, 5:30 pm

  • Wszystko moz e sie przytrafic
    Anything Can Happen

    Poland 1995 40'
    Directed by: Marcel Łozinski
    A child is running in a park. Amazed, he stops in front of a peacock, watches plants and flowers enthusiastically. A little farther, a few elderly people are sitting on the benches scattered among the trees, resting. The child gets closer to the couples, those absorbed in reading, and melancholy, lonely women and men. Each encounter makes way for some exchange on equal terms, some discussion of the most varied subjects, such as the war, the disappointment in a spent long life, or the hopes of those who still believe anything can happen – meet a dinosaur, or live for six hundred years. Maybe defeat death.

    2013 Saturday, November 30th, Odeon, 8:00 pm

  • Zderzenie czołowe
    Front Collision

    Poland 1976 10'
    Directed by: Marcel Łozinski
    Marian Cudny is a retired railway worker. He had an exemplary career, rich in commendations and praises. Only at the end, six months before retiring, he was responsible for a railway accident. Therefore, the official end-of-career celebrations were cancelled. A documentary film open to embrace aesthetic and narrative practices and forms coming from fiction.

    2013 Wednesday, December 4th, Spazio Alfieri, 3:00 pm

  • Zeby nie bolało
    So It Doesn’ t Hurt

    Poland 1998 46'
    Directed by: Marcel Łozinski
    1997, more than twenty years since M. Łozinski first visited Urszula Flis, who “starred” in The Visit (Wizyta). M. Łozinski, who likes to re-film and re-edit ma terials from the past, is still standing behind the camera. This time, though, he interacts openly with his protagonist, and reconstructs a virtual shot and reverse shot of their dialogue.

    2013 Sunday, December 1st, Spazio Alfieri, 5:30 pm

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