Amy Berg and Przemyslaw Wojcieszek. Two world meet at Tofifest.
There are many cinema celebrities present among the guests to the Tofifest festival that lasts until Sunday, this week. One day, two of such guests came to take part in festival screenings, and both differ from each other just as night and day. One of them was Academy Awards nominee Amy Berg and enfant terrible of Polish cinema, Przemyslaw Wojcieszek.
Janis Joplin – was she a sad girl?
The American documentary filmmaker known for Deliver Us from Evil, which was nominated for Academy Awards, talked with the festival audience about the legendary singer, author of lyrics, and a hippie icon, Janis Joplin.
Amy Berg decided to make her the main figure of the latest film Janis: Little Girl Blue, in which the director has revealed a previously unknown face of the artist.
'The possibility of making this film was a great joy for me. Joplin was the first woman to have achieved such tremendous success on the American music scene, she has an incredible voice, and most importantly her music is still relevant today,' commented the director. What Amy Berg found most surprising during working on the film was the extreme contrast between the image of Janis Joplin and her private life. 'Everybody remembers her as a stage animal, but in reality she was an emotionally fragile persona, going through intense inner dramas,' explained Amy Berg. As an example of that, the film analyses the fact that Joplin was rejected by her peers in school. For that reason and also for many others, the film by Amy Berg is part of the 27 Club section – the main section of Tofifest 2015. By way of that section, the festival shows how cinema tried to reply to the phenomenon of a group of musicians, who passed away at 27, and have included in the so-called 27 Club, by enthusiasts of conspiracy theories. Janis died at 27, as well.
One of the main problems troubling the making of the film was its costs. Archive footage is often quite expensive and copyrights form a barrier that prevents them from being used without proper permission. Another potential problem was lurking in the unique method of filmmaking adopted by the director. Previously, she had always started working based on a concrete concept, but with Janis: Little Girl Blue it was just the opposite: she started with the materials she had at her disposal, and everything else was later adjusted to fit to that.
More interestingly, the director mentioned the name Natalia Przybysz, a Polish singer, who made a record with covers of songs by Janis Joplin. According to Amy Berg, it was just one of many proofs that the heroine of her film is still a meaningful person and artist, who continues to have an impact on the contemporary international music scene, 45 years after her death.
Wojcieszek discussing (Non)Wojcieszek
Przemyslaw Wojcieszek came to Tofifest with his latest film Berlin Diaries, which is a very original film journal, featuring the director himself, in the leading role.
'I really needed this film to deal with my problems. It is a piece of my life captured at a very special moment,' explained the director, during the meeting. But just as literary journals are under a strong influence of their author's original (auto)creation, Berlin Diaries is similarly not reduced to being only a record of a certain period of one's life. The director confirmed that they include quite a lot of fictional elements, or a fictional narrative structure, if you will. Such structure and involving Joanna Laganowska to be part of the project made it possible for the director to make the story more coherent and orderly, although it is still far away from the classical linear narrative in a film.
Wojcieszek was inspired by a number of similar films (for example, by Kim Ki-Duk's Arirang), and in his film experiment (quite exhibitionist in nature, one must admit), he analyses the boundary between what can and what cannot be still referred to as cinema. Wojcieszek considered that experience to be very peculiar and challenging, in many aspects: 'I am not an actor, so I find it extremely difficult to talk about myself, even if it is fictional.'
Judging by reactions of the audience, Berlin Diaries is a challenging experience for viewers, too, but the initial discomfort and impatience finally disappears, replaced instead by the intention to be part of a conversation discussion, or even a quarrel with (Non)Wojcieszek in the film, and the subject to discuss can be virtually anything: life, death, love, beauty and ugliness, boredom, poverty, city and nature, cinema and acting, and also the camera as a method of botho recording and touching the world.
Press Office of Tofifest, Ewa Pakalska & Artur Klimek
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