The Last Family
FilmPolska (May 3-10) celebrates Polish cinema with festival circuit favourites and Conrad-inspired classics.
The 12th edition of FilmPolska is a city-wide celebration, with a total of 76 films screening in 16 venues across town, from Bundesplatz Kino to Wolf in Neukölln. The “New Polish Cinema” strand emphasizes emerging talent, and harbours some true gems. A hit on last year’s festival circuit, Jan P. Matuszyński’s The Last Family (photo) is an intensely claustrophobic, at times darkly comic domestic drama based on the life of artist Zdzisław Beksiński. All These Sleepless Nights netted Michal Marczak a best documentary director award at Sundance last year, although to describe it as a documentary is perhaps to undersell its transcendental beauty. Thrusting the viewer straight into the headspace of a listless twentysomething in modern-day Warsaw, it’s a lucid dream of a film that fans of Terrence Malickor Wong Kar-wai will especially dig. The curators also pay tribute to high priest of modern Polish cinema Andrzej Wajda, who died last October, with screenings of three of the late master’s nest 1960s offerings: Innocent Sorcerers, Everything for Sale and Hunting Flies. Meanwhile, Zeughauskino presents some stone-cold classics inspired by the work of Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad, including Hitchcock’s blistering 1936 thriller Sabotage and the glorious redux cut of Coppola’s Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now.
FilmPolska, May 3-10, Various venues | Full programme at filmpolska.de