Danuta Szaflarska eats a good cake
On Saturday, we could still hear the echoes of the Friday award ceremony. Nonetheless, the pace of the Tofifest festival has not slowed down and there are more guests to meet with the audience.
The key event on Saturday was the meeting with Danuta Szaflarska. She is a prominent Polish actress and a winner of a special Golden Angel of Tofifest for Lifetime Achievement 2014, and her Saturday meeting with the audience followed the screening of Another World by Dorota Kedzierzawska, which has been dedicated to this wonderful actress. Danuta Szaflarska is 99 years old and this makes her the oldest actress still performing on the stage. “It seems there are not too many to compete with me,” she laughed during the meeting. “We are becoming fewer and fewer in numbers, but the world of film still has a need for old ladies.” The excellent sense of humour and the ability to look at herself from a distance have been the ingredients that made her extremely successful, as an actress. She has worked with great many outstanding film directors and played hundreds of roles. However, she is unable to decide which of them has been her favourite one. “You only remember well the things that went bad,” she concluded.
Her recipe for becoming a good actor is having respect for one’s work. Each role requires great effort and humility. And a lot of luck, for that matter. The truth is that the actor’s work is 50% luck and coincidence and the other 50% their skills. “One cannot simply play, because that makes you a bad actor; you need to become the character you play,” she claims. “I have always preferred characters that were my complete contradiction. I still remember the joy I felt when playing the role of a witch. Now, that was something! Because there is nothing interesting in playing a romantic lead or a stage beauty,” she laughed. Naturally, there were questions about her secret to have a long life. She smiled and replied that what matters is one’s nature and temperament. One must enjoy everything that comes to them and just love to live. “You need to enjoy a beautiful thing, when you see one. The same applies to a good cake – be happy, if you have eaten one,” laughed Danuta Szaflarska.
The Saturday at Tofifest was also the day of the Polish premiere of Gottland by Lukáš Kokeš, Petr Hátle, and Viera Čákanyova, which is an adaptation of the book by the Polish journalist Mariusz Szczygiel. We could also see the newest film by Ken Loach – Jimmy’s Hall – which was screened as part of the FORUM section. There were also hundreds of viewers, who came to see Winter Sleep by Nuri Bilge Ceylan – the film won Palme d’Or and the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes.
The audience at Tofifest could also see Leviathan by Andriej Zwiagincew, which is a metaphorical satire on modern Russia – the film won the Best Screenplay Prize at Cannes 2014. Soundtrack to the film was based on the beautiful music by Philip Glass from the “Akhnaten” opera. In the evening, there was also the screening of the key film for this year’s edition of Tofifest, i.e. Millennium: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It was exactly the original Swedish version directed by Niels Arden Oplev. The axis of the visual representation of Tofifest 2014 and the Nordic Noir section were scenes from the film adaptation of the trilogy by Stieg Larsson.
There were also the last concerts of the Audiowizje festival: Estrada Stagebar Torun played host to the concerts by Sounds Like The End Of The World and Signal from Europa, while Dwa Swiaty festival club to Moustache-ElectroMoustache. Finally, the coolest film workshops for children – FILMOGRANIE at Tofifest: Western – started at Domkultury!
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Now, let us go back to the meetings that took place during the last days of Tofifest. On Friday, there was a meeting with Daniel Olbrychski, winner of this year’s Golden Angel for Artistic Insolence. The master of acting spoke at length about the nature of his profession. “The primary job an actor has to perform is to complete the task. If you are cast for a play by Shakespeare, you must first and foremost move the audience, and if it is a comedy by Fredro, you must make them laugh,” he said. According to Olbrychski, acting of the highest quality is based on the ability to flexibly transform from one role to another. When confronted with the question whether there was such a thing for an actor as “the role of a lifetime”, he quoted Meryl Streep, who, in his opinion, gave the most beautiful answer to that question: “Do not ask me about the role I think to be my most important one or the most successful one, or the one I love the most. Each of the roles is one of my children. I carried them within me and gave birth to them, in pain and in happiness. I love all of them just as much as the people I have conceived them with.”
What qualities must a good actor have? Such a person must possess two completely contradictory qualities: incredible self-confidence and equally incredible humility. When you are performing as Hamlet and utter the phrase “to be, or not to be”, you must be truly confident that you are the only person allowed to play this role. On the other hand, you also must have this humility towards the text you are saying and towards the audience you are performing for. The combination of these two contradictions is a promise that the role could be a successful one. When seeing the audience coming in such great numbers to meet with him, he said that he it could still surprise him that there were people interested in listening to him. Finally, he mentioned his plans for the future he hoped could come to fruition. He had been offered to be a member of the jury in Cannes. And he is still curious of what the next day has to offer.
One day after the screening of Onirica – Field of Dogs, festival goers had the pleasure of listening to the lecture of the film director Lech Majewski titled “The hidden language of symbols in the film.” In a room packed with people, Lech Majewski used the following film classics: The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock, Godfather by Francis Ford Coppola, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Milos Forman, and Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino, to illustrate the meaning of symbols in the film. „The language in cinema is not complete, if it does not use a symbolic language. In other words, one cannot make a brilliant film, if there is no symbol in it,” the director proved. Somebody among the audience asked the director what he thought was a more valuable film – the one packed with symbols but incomprehensible to a wider audience, or the one made for an average cinema goer. Lech Majewski replied that he did not know such a division and although his films were full of symbols, he believed the preferred audience to discuss them were simple people, who best understand his films. The other of the questions referred to “the using of a symbol for the sake of the symbol itself.” According to Majewski, it was the question of taste and intuition, although the best symbols resulted from the action on screen and were naturally incorporated into the plot. Majewski gave a sharp answer to the question about the symbolic scene at the end of Aftermath by Wladyslaw Pasikowski: “I did not make it that far, as I left after just one-third of the film. The film was such nonsense that I could not bear to see it. It is a film for morons,” replied the director.
“You will not find your individual Parajanov, as everybody has their own. The film offers just my vision and you can embrace it, or not,” said the Ukrainian film director Olena Fetisova, during the meeting that followed the screening of Parajanov in the ON AIR competition. She mentioned the difficulties encountered when making the film. “Many claimed I was a crazy blonde, who had gone too far with her imagination. Nobody believed we could actually make it. To Olena Fetisova, the figure of Parajanov has a more private dimension: Practically speaking, I was raised on set. My grandparents were involved in film production and would often take me with them. As a small child, I had an opportunity to meet Parajanov in person. I still remember the impression he made on me,” she remembered. However, one may be taken a little by surprise, when confronted with the convention of the film. All those, who are familiar with the documentary work of Olena Fetisova, know that the film is her full-length debut. „Parajanov built his own legend, when he was still alive. No documentary will ever reflect the complexity of this character, in its entirety. It was only possible in “a film about an artist”: slightly mad, full of passion, and unpredictable. If you want to know the details of his biography, search in Google,” laughed Fetisova. The film seems particularly important, considering the current political situation. Olena Fetisova remembered: “Nowadays, young people fight for themselves and for their freedom, in the very same manner, as Parajanov once did. This film seems very relevant in the times of Putin and other dictators.”
“Crime is the same everywhere, be it Scandinavia or Poland – there is always a victim and a detective, who gets to solve the case,” said Michal Otlowski, director of Waterline, at the meeting following the screening of the film. Since the very beginning of the meeting it was clear that the audience shared the opinion of film critics and considered the debut film by Otlowski to be much in the vein of Scandi drama and film work of the Coen brothers. However, the director himself denied to have drawn any inspiration from the mentioned sources, claiming that he had not read a crime novel in at least a decade and never had any contact with Scandinavian literature. Denying further allegations that there were similarities to Scandinavian crime drama, Otlowski agreed that the audience had a right to interpret the film the way they saw fit. Dark scenes, dark colours, little light, and grey weather matched the general qualities of a generic film. Film is art to the audience – the director summed up – and without the audience it becomes only a sad reality, said Michal Otlowski.
The Sunday is the last day of Tofifest 2014.
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