Bruno Schulz is hungry.
Hunger, Snufit, and The 13th Month. The afore-mentioned are the titles of three completely different films that have one thing in common: none of them have been made yet, although they have been discussed for months.
It is Ukraine, 1933. People live off bark from trees and there is an increase in the number of incidents of cannibalism. People are suffering the Holodomor (the Great Famine) orchestrated by the Stalin's communists. This is not a preview of a film being made by people from the Euromaidan in Kiev, but by Marika Krajnievska, a young Russian filmmaker, who has ties with Torun. Hunger, Snufit, and The 13th Month are all highly anticipated films, made in Torun. Will we get the chance to see them this year?
Each of the three film stories differ in nearly everything – their subjects, sources of inspiration, and personalities of their directors. They are so much-anticipated, because the already completed fragments clearly demonstrate that the final product is worth the wait. Unfortunately, as for now all three films can be referred to as shelved projects of the 21st century. Back in the times of the Communist regime, this term was applied to the films shelved in storehouses, by decree of political censorship. Nowadays, it has been replaced with a different censorship – an economic one. All the three film productions cannot be completed for financial reasons, despite the support of the municipal self-government that enabled the carrying out of shooting. The remedy would be to attract sponsors, as it is definitely worth investing in Hunger, Snufit, and The 13th Month.
Hunger, or Ukraine seen through Russian eyes
The story of Hunger goes back several years. It is a quite fascinating one, as I’d rather expect Ukrainians themselves to shoot a film about one of the greatest tragedies in the history of Ukraine. Meanwhile, it is a Russian filmmaker from Saint Petersburg, who has decided to live her life in Torun and Warsaw, to get down to this subject. And this subject still hurts, like an open wound. Ukraine is still struggling to have the Holodomor that claimed lives of several million Ukrainians acknowledged as the crime of genocide. Russia opposes this claim in every possible way. And the affair has been all the more complicated by the conflict between Ukraine and pro-Russian separatists.
Hunger does not have pretensions to be an epic. Krajnievska has focused on a single human tragedy. Using this perspective, we find ourselves in the home of Viera, a Ukrainian peasant woman and a mother of two, who tries desperately to save her children from slowly starving to death. And it is the drama of those three people that the film revolves around. I have had this story in me since childhood, admits Marika. The figure of the main heroine is completely authentic. My grandpa told me about her fate, because he knew her personally. He met her, after she had already gone mad from starvation” - the director revealed in an interview.
Most of the shooting work has already been done. The Ukrainian village has been successfully “played” by the Ethnographic Museum in Torun, with the support of the open-air ethnographic museum in Sierpc (among others, famous for Pan Tadeusz by A. Wajda). The cast includes Mateusz Damięcki and Piotr Głowacki (the latter is a Torun-born winner of the Zbigniew Cybulski Award and the Flisak of Tofifest). Soundtrack to the film was composed by Maciej Pawłowski, who has already shown his talent in Floating Skyscrapers and Hans Kloss. More than Death at Stake.
And why is it worth investing in completing this film? Because it is a unique subject, completely ignored in Poland. It is also very important to understand the contemporary situation in Ukraine. For it is the Great Famine that has finally divided Ukraine into two separate worlds: the pro-Western one and the pro-Soviet one, and the tragic consequences of this division are shown in everyday news. And since Marika Krajnievska does not intend to release a “semi-finished product”, she plans for Hunger to participate in competition at big international film festivals. Feel invited to help her out and to satisfy her financial hunger.
Snufit, or about a mad corporate woman
Both Hunger and Snufit share a number of people that work in both film teams, including Piotr Głowacki and Marika Krajnievska. However, these are as far as similarities go, because Snufit is definitely from a much different film world. The film has been directed by Marcel Woźniak and Paweł Zawadzki, two young filmmakers from Torun. Woźniak made his mark in 2012 with his an excellent, independent short film titled Caissa. This story about how easy we lose track of the most important things in life, has been described by one of journalists from Torun, as the best way of spending money on culture in 2012. This has only increased the appetite for Snufit. The mass media were slowly fed with more and more intriguing shots from the set, and finally with the first teaser. All the more so, as Snufit is an unconventional thing. It is a surreal and drug-induced journey into the depths of imagination, which is undertaken by Joan, an employee in a big corporation. The work she is assigned just a couple of days before her 30th birthday takes her to a world she did not expect to see. Joan is portrayed by Matylda Podfilipska – one of the actresses definitely underrated. Her partners in the film include the already mentioned Piotr Głowacki, as well as Tomasz Mycan and Radosław Garncarek.
When asked how he came up with the concept, he offered a surprising answer: One evening, I was home and an ambulance with the siren on parked near my windows. Lights of the siren were reflected on the walls in my room. I was simply curious to see what was going on inside the ambulance. The door in the ambulance was open, but I did not see the man brought inside the vehicle. And this was the impulse to make the film – the mystery of an open door that you look through, but see nothing.
The teaser posted on YouTube features the heroine roaming the streets of dark Torun, wearing a white bunny outfit, a trance party, and corporate rat race. The Torun version of David Lynch – why not? The film has already been made, thanks to the support of Toruńska Agenda Kulturalna (Torun Cultural Department) and TUMULT Foundation, but it will require making some final corrections in the material, in order to go one step further and hit festivals. It is worth supporting the project, as Marcel Woźnik is a genuine rising star. It would be absolutely disastrous to see him end up with just one film in his portfolio.
Schulz and nude women
What did Bruno Schulz dream about? And why were his dreams so erotic in nature? What did he think about in the last moments preceding his death? Director Marcin Gładych tries to answer the questions above in his film The 13th Month – the director has already acquired fame with fantastically received documentary Freedom Hackers and the first Polish community-oriented film Panopticon (Grand Prix at the Festival of Historic Films in Zdunska Wola).
Bruno Schulz is one of the most intriguing figures in Polish art. He was a peaceful Jewish teacher, who transformed himself into a titan of dark eroticism, in his books – he was murdered by German soldiers, in his hometown Drohobych. It only took two collections of short stories to secure him a permanent place in the history of international literature.
According to Gładych, he discovered the story by accident: I found an article about the last hours in the life of Bruno Schulz. The drama of a Jew, an artist, and a man, who was so close to freedom, truly stirred up my emotions. Nobody could tell what he was thinking about, when walking the street he was shot on. I intend to show that he was walking towards freedom, in the last moments of his life. And that he died happy.
In his films, Gładych was consistently focused on interweaving documentary motifs with storyline fragments. In The 13th Month, the documentary part presents the last days in the life of the writer, while the storyline part is based on staged dreams of Bruno Schulz. The first part has already been shot and the photos from the set in the Artus Court in Torun that leaked to mass media have made quite a fuss. It is quite understandable, as Gładych is not shooting a clichéd film. The dreams of Bruno Schulz are a perfect reflection of his imagination: full of nudity and eroticism streaked with an undertone of perversion. When acting out such scenes, Radosław Smużny and Anna Zawadzka did not resort to unnecessary prudery, which was further confirmed during closed screenings available strictly to invited guests. The three cinematographers Adam Fisz, Natalia Miedziak, and Jacek Banach did a good job, which is a promise of an interesting final product. All the more so, as the soundtrack to the film is being composed by Michał Hajduczenia, a young composer from Torun, who specialises in Eastern music, while sound effects are to be made by a famous DJ, Łukasz Milewski.
Gładych intends to make it a large-scale project, as it was supposed to be shot in Torun, in Rakoniewice, in Poznan, and also in Drohobych and Sambir in Ukraine.
Alas, fortune did not smile on him. The premiere was planned on 19th November 2014, which is now very unlikely to happen, as The 13th Month has run into a financial barricade. Why is it worth investing in this film? For each project of Marcin Gładych is a unique event, both in the artistic and social scales. And because there are still too few films that make an effort to interpret the phenomenon of Bruno Schulz and art of Polish Jews.
A-B-C
Artists have already made the first step and shot their films. Self-government has made the second step, by providing funds to support production. Who will make the third step (to complete this A-B-C sequence), so we can see Hunger, Snufit, and The 13th Month?
One can see some hope in crowdfunding sites, such as wspieramkulture.pl or polakpotrafi.pl. They have become successful platforms for raising funds for other filmmakers from the region of Kujawsko-Pomorskie: Tomasz Szafrański (Klub Włóczykijów/The Drifters Club) and Karolina Ford (Prześwity/Gaps).
But my loudest call goes to businesses from Torun and the region – help us take these films off the shelf, as it is worth every penny to invest in culture. It is worth doing, because this is the only way to ever finding out, whether Schulz experienced any “hunger”.
This text will be simultaneously published on the blog at http://festiwaltofifest.blogspot.com and Gazeta.pl
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