In 80 Million, the 2011 film from Waldemar Krzystek, Ocean’s 11 meets the Solidarity Movement in 1980s Poland. It’s fast paced, witty, fun and easy, yet driven by an idealism which the American blockbuster lacks. Directed by Waldemar Krzystek in 2011, it’s set the tone for a new way of approaching Poland’s experience of communism. ‘We didn’t…
| 23/03/2017
The Little Prince – the classic novella by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – is about a pilot stranded in the Sahara desert, visited there by a child, the Little Prince of the title. The two form a friendship, and The Pilot learns of the life of his visitor, who hails from a tiny asteroid, in turn…
| 22/03/2017
Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl collected the testimonies of survivors from the nuclear disaster: military personnel, medical professionals, and, most importantly, ordinary people. Her book is a series of stories that tell the untold: how little the people in the Soviet Union, and especially the Ukraine and Belarus, knew about what happened the night the…
| 12/03/2017
Endless train timetables. Russian border patrol. Patches of forest that swallow you up. A thick fog that brings it memories of a time long gone. Anything but an ordinary film, Tomáš Luňák’s interpretation of Jaromir99’s graphic novel trilogy about the train dispatcher Alois Nebel is a full-length, animated drama, playing at a pivotal moment…
| 07/03/2017
In ‘Neon’, Eric Bednarski’s award-winning 2014 documentary, the history of Warsaw is traced through its neon lights. It’s a retelling of Polish history, mixing documentary features from several decades, focusing in on small stories alongside the great events of the recent past. We caught up with the Director here. CEEL: How did you come to choose neon…
| 25/02/2017
In this award-winning documentary, director Eric Bednarski traces the history of Poland’s capital through the city’s neon lights – merging design, politics and history in an ambitiously innovative project. It’s a retelling of Polish history, so often the subject of grand films that exploit the emotional weight of its traumatic turns from Nazism to Stalinism.…
| 20/02/2017
In a way, communism has always been playing on the masses. There are endless things hidden within the People – power, union and also a great deal of herd mentality. Matei Visniec’s What Shall We Do With the Cello? – performed by Atelier Theatre Studio as part of the Vault Festival 2017 – delicately opens…
| 13/02/2017
Ognisko Polskie, the Polish Hearth Club, is an exquisite venue: glistening chandeliers please the eye, red velvet lines the elegant staircases; this quiet haven in South Kensington is full of Old World charm. Last Saturday night, a traditional version of Chekhov’s play The Seagull was produced here. Set on a lake estate in Imperial Russia,…
| 12/02/2017
Tracy Letts’ adaptation of Chekhov’s 1900 play – directed by Phil Wilmott – gives an English, deadpan intonation to Russian humor. The expansive, often ironic comedy characteristic of Chekhov’s plays persists even though Letts has cut and altered considerable portions of the original text. The layout of the Union Theatre in Southwark, which has the…
| 27/01/2017
Just before the Barbican screening of his award-winning 2016 film We Are Never Alone, director Petr Václav took some time to frame his work in a conversation that started out with questions about Czech identity, and ended on post-truth masculinity and why We Are Never Alone is, essentially, a feminist film: women have a future,…
| 12/12/2016