‘The Studio: A Tireless, Ongoing Space’, Geta Brătescu’s solo exhibition at Camden Arts Centre, pays long overdue homage to an artist whose work is strikingly fragile yet powerful at the same time. Not least, it also spans over almost half a century, even though the show largely focuses on works produced in the 70s and…
| 02/05/2017
What do we mean by ‘home’? This is the central question posed by Romanian playwright Andreaa Bortun in her play Ashes Afar, recently performed in English at the Romanian Cultural Institute in London’s Belgrave Square. Bortun’s raw and uncompromising script shows us glimpses of the lives of a migrant couple from two different cultures living…
| 17/04/2017
Scene One: A crowd gets eaten by the roasted chickens and crabs on the banquet table. Scene Two: As a train moves, all that an onscreen silhouette of a man sees is a repetitive countryside landscape saturated with an intense green colour. Yet as soon as the man gets into the city, the landscape becomes…
| 15/04/2017
‘The importance of ordinary people, the everyday, belief in artistic freedom and the rejection of established cinematic norms are some of the principles common to the early work of Czech director Milos Forman and the British Free Cinema movement. This programme, jointly curated with Close-Up and screening from original 16mm and 35mm prints, marks Miloš…
| 09/04/2017
Any attempt to tell the story of the October Revolution is inevitably going to be controversial, showing the author’s own political views and laying them to open to accusations of personal bias. For this reason, the revolution is rarely engaged with in everyday culture outside the realm of post-Marxist academic debate or historical fiction. The…
| 04/04/2017
Tomek is the man who has it all in Slovenian born director Mitja Okorn’s 2016 rom-com Planeta Singli. Set in Poland, it features a celebrated chat show host with a cult following, Tomek (Maciej Stuhr), who not only has a successful career but also women falling at his feet. Yet clearly there’s also something lacking…
| 02/04/2017
Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage (Ostatni Etap) is one of the world’s earliest feature films about the Holocaust, premiering in Poland as early as March 1948. It’s also a personal narrative: partly based on Jakubowska’s own experiences at Birkenau women’s camp at Auschwitz, The Last Stage chronicles life in the camp from a personal angle, filmed on…
| 02/04/2017
Death doesn’t always put things in perspective, at least not when art is involved. Were it not the last project by one of the 20th century’s great filmmakers, Powidoki, (Afterimage) might have made a respectful turn on the international film circuit before fading into genteel obscurity. With the passing of Andrzej Wajda last year this…
| 29/03/2017
In some ways it may come as a surprise to discover that a film as bizarre as The Last Family (Ostatnia Rodzina) is based firmly on reality, detailing the life of the internationally acclaimed Polish artist Zdzislaw Beksinski. On the other hand, perhaps the absurdity of it all strikes a bit too close to home to…
| 25/03/2017
Janusz Majewski’s film The Eccentrics (Excentrycy) bagged several awards at the Polish Academy Awards in 2016, including best supporting actor and actress (Wojciech Pszoniak and Anna Dymna), and best film score. Least surprising is the latter, given that it’s a musical comedy, which focuses on a Jazz Big Band in 1950s communist Poland. Fabian Apanowicz…
| 25/03/2017