17. March 2017

Feature Film Competition

Curator Tomasz Raczek about the Feature Film Competition

In times where ideals gradually begin to alter, more and more people turn their gaze to art, even if artists do not actually know more than we ordinary people do. But perhaps it is because they simply feel more? Perhaps they are the ones who have the answers to our questions. Maybe they can even alleviate our common fears. Can they comfort us? One thing is for certain, and that is that this year’s cinematic pieces will keep us on our toes. They demonstrate how filmmakers are just as lost as we are. They collect fragments of reality and transform them into a piece of art, conveying it in a way that we simply cannot overlook. They are not trying to generalise. They simply try to tell us what they see. Sometimes, films manage to surprise us. Such as the Hungarian story Kills on Wheels, where disabled people play very unusual roles. Sometimes, however, films deal with fear, as in the second Hungarian entry, The Citizen. The focus is on refugee issues, which increasingly overwhelm the population in Europe. Perhaps this is why we currently have a strong need for quiet stories about fates that are grounded in the tradition of its own place in the world. Train Driver’s Diary from Serbia is about the lives of two engine drivers, father and son, taking place far from global tensions. Romanian entry Illegitimate is another kind of family story and points out the wide gap and misunderstandings that often exist between the generations within a family. The Slovenian film Nightlife draws attention to the fact that sometimes we appreciate fame more than health, or even life itself. The Constitution from Croatia, however, resembles a magic cube which combines it all: truth and imitation, love and madness. How can one live in times like these? Death in Sarajevo from Bosnia and Herzegovina is, all in all, a sad story. The shadow of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand still hovers over the city and the idea of war seems strikingly present. The Polish film Playground doesn’t bring comfort either: apparently, we all carry evil within ourselves and it is just waiting for the right moment to finally overtake us. Finally, The Student from Russia shows how crossing over to conservatism and rigorously following the rules are no good solutions either. And what about the role of women in a crumbled men’s world? Two films are focusing on this question: Georgian entry Anna’s life and The Nest of the Turtledove from Ukraine. These films do not give definitive answers nor do they cause despair. The central message here is actually rather that women grow stronger with each and every passing day.

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