Ukraine is a bottle of champagne
The Thursday at Tofifest was in its entirety dedicated to Ukraine. The reason for that was the debated called Ukraine – The Future of Culture, with the participation of film director Olena Fetisova, film activist and a member of Babylon ’13 Larysa Artiugina, producer Volodymyr Kozyr, and Dr Lukasz Jasina, who is an expert in Ukrainian cinema and mass media. There was also a screening of the documentary I am Femen by Alain Margot, about the controversial feminine protest group Femen. The audience had a chance to see the Ukrainian Paradjanov by Olena Fetisova and Serge Avedikian – the film is one of the contestants in the On Air main competition.
As for the debate itself, it had a somewhat perverse name. The name Ukraine – The Future of Culture was both a sentence and a question, concerning the future of culture in one of our neighbouring countries, and also a question, whether the culture in Ukraine can be the future of European culture. Can Ukraine repeat the success of Polish culture, which has gained an international reputation in recent decades? During the debate, guests from Ukraine said that what their national culture requires the most from Poland right now is assistance in creating the rules to ensure that their culture operates on a European level. The truth is that Ukraine lacks the procedures that regulate financing of culture by the state, which have been worked out and implemented in Poland for many years, as well as strong institutions, such as our Polish Film Institute, and finally a system of non-government cultural organizations, and proper education. To top it all, there is no genuine cultural policy in Ukraine. However, our guests showed no fear, concerning the future and potential of their filmmakers. Olena Fetisova made an interesting comparison: “Ukraine is like a bottle of good champagne, which has been maturing in the cellar for a long time. All it takes now is to pull out the cork and champagne of fine bouquet will pour out. This is a portrait of our culture. We will conquer Europe. Just give us a little time and… peace,” she concluded.
Among many important festival guests and interesting meetings, we must not fail to mention the visit of the winner of a special Golden Angel Bohdan Sláma. This outstanding Czech film director had a meeting with the audience, following the screening of his latest film Four Suns. The audience also had a chance to meet with Lech Majewski, one of the masters of Polish cinema, which followed directly after the screening of his latest film Onirica — Field of Dogs. Finally, there was a meeting with Michal Otlowski, author of Waterline – the meeting followed after the screening of the film and the room was packed with people.
The Thursday was also the first day of the Replica of the Children’s Film Festival addressed to kids. There were also the last concerts of the Audiowizje festival Showcase competition: Mery Spolsky, Blue Deep Shorts, Skycykle, Donut, and Falender & Gwizdała Duotre.
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Now, let us go back to the meetings that took place on Wednesday.
The meeting with the Estonian film director and a special guest to Tofifest Ilmar Raag introduced the audience to the process of making I won’t come back and the history of this film. “Love is not only about receiving, but also about giving,” said Ilmar Raag, considering this phrase to be the main message of his film. According to the director, the story to be told must be above normality, everyday life, and be in some way unique, in order for him to become interested in it. Every person sees the world in their own way and filters it through the lens of their own problems, the director claimed. Ilmar Raag also referred to the fact that we are all very different from each other.
The Estonian film director said that he did not invent the stories presented in his films. Sometimes he heard them in random sounds, sometimes he read about them somewhere, and only then translated them into the language of film. Raag is one of the most significant voices of the modern Estonian cinema. His film The Class stirred quite a range of emotions among the citizens of this Baltic state. As for Kertu (Love is Blind), it turned out to be a box-office success.
Bogdan Dziworski is a famous film director, cinematographer, and photographer from Poland. On Wednesday, an exhibition of his photographs was opened at the Centre for Contemporary Art. It is called Paper Chase and Other Party Games and comprises a collection of more than thirty pictures. The exhibition will show the most famous photographs that have already become part of the history of Polish photography, but also those that have been discovered in the rich archives of the artist, by a Polish representative of Leica Gallery Warszawa. The collection constitutes an in-depth analysis of man and woman relationships, the essence of masculinity and femininity, and their nuances and subtleties.
The visit of Anka Sasnal, artist and director of Parasite (FROM POLAND competition), gathered the audience in great numbers. According to the director, the title parasite (it is translated into Polish as “bracket fungus”) can be a metaphor describing any of the protagonists in the film – the man, the woman, the child, and the factory, as the latter also constitutes a separate organism. Anka Sasnal said that there was a very unique relationship between each of the protagonists, in which there are parasites to one another. Both directors Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal were interested in showing the physiology of the correlation between the protagonists. Anka Sasnal considers the editing process as her favourite part of film production. In the case of Parasite, it took as many as nine months. At that point of the meeting, an interesting fact was revealed. The couple had a serious row, which ended in their working separately on the editing of the film, for two months. Anka Sasnal concluded that the final merging of both versions did the film good.
Following the screening of Heavy Mental, the audience had a chance to meet with the authors of the film – the screenwriter and director Sebastian Buttny, and Piotr Glowacki, who played Piotr. The host of the meeting inquired about the genre the film could be included in. The invited guests failed to provide an unequivocal answer. Instead, they put great emphasis on the freedom they had when making the film and how it let them play with different film genres. According to their point of view, the title “heavy mental” is about “costumes from our youth, our youthful need to be part of a group, and our attempts to find our own identity within a community.” According to Glowacki, Heavy Mental is also a kind of a story about cinema, as cinema or theatre are supposed to be stories about a community that should be received in a wider circle of people.
Other guests to Tofifest included the creators of some of the most intriguing video clips made in Poland, i.e. Psychokino collective: Dorota Piskor and Tomek Slesicki. Both of them have graduated from the Warsaw Film School and changed the face of Polish video clips. The film clips made by Psychokino are unconventional, extremely vivid, and emotional. Among others, they made video clips for Dawid Podsiadlo and BOKKA (an alternative band from Poland). “Our music market has been growing very fast, in recent years. There are many cool and young artists popping up, who are a breath of fresh air,” said Dorota Piskor. “We make use of this phenomenon and find hidden meanings in both lyrics and music, using our imagination, and then translate those meanings into comprehensible pictures. However, there is a question of financial considerations…,” she added. The duo is currently waiting for the premiere of their brand new video clip, which is impending. Unfortunately, there was no way of making the artists reveal anything about the coming video clip. ”It is a secret. Let us put this in general terms: it will be fun, a little perverse, and a little more psycho,” they claimed.
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The Friday at Tofifest will be a day of presenting festival awards. The Closing Ceremony of the Festival will take place at 7:30 p.m., and shortly after that there will be a screening of the closing film: Fury, directed by David Ayer, starring Brad Pitt in the leading role. However, this will not be the end of Tofifest 2014, as film screenings will continua, until Sunday evening – all Torun residents and guests from Poland are already invited!
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