Movie reviews

16TH DOCS AGAINST GRAVITY FILM FESTIVAL

It takes an entire year to organise. Once one festival is over, the next one begins to be prepared. So here comes a breakdown of what the organisers say about the 2019 one. This year one more city will host it - Katowice. And in Warsaw and Wroclaw, in one cinema each, audiodescription will be provided. The jury will include Michał Marczak of "Wszystkie nieprzespane noce" ("All These Sleepless Nights"), Hanna Polak and Layla Hosseini. Peter Jackson's first film since "Hobbit" will be screened. It will talk about WW1 soldiers and is formed from coloured black and white pictures which renders it more realist and surrealist at the same time. Cinematographer Jolanta Dylewska's own, directed by herself, documentary "Marek Edelman... i była miłość w getcie" ("Mark Edelman... and There Was Love in the Ghetto") is coming too. Croatian "Srbenka" will tell about a a girl who was raped and the perpetrators got no punishment. Polish "In Touch" is about Polish migration to Iceland. Apparently 1 million 200 thousand Ukrainian smartphones are registered in Poland - the Ukrainian immigration constitutes the topic of "Jazda obowiązkowa" ("Compulsory Figures"). "Talking About Trees" deals with the Islamic dictatorship which ruined expat students' film-making ambitions on return to Sudan and Tchad. On 11th May "Symfonia Fabryki Ursus" ("Symphony of the Ursus Factory") will premiere with a splash, including a show of tractors driven in front of the cinema. Ecology will be covered in "Soyalism" - about monopolising the food market. The Science Non-Fiction section will talk about AI. Letizia Battaglia, the protagonist of "Shooting the Mafia" will be a guest. Apparently she's famous not only for photographing the Sicilian mafia but also for her much younger lovers, e.g. 20, 30, 40 years. In Herzog's "Meeting Gorbachev" they talk but weird bits thrown into narration abound. "Jean Paul Gaultier Fait Son Show" ("Jean Paul Gaultier: Freak & Chic") is a colourful show. "Bellingcat - Truth in a Post-Truth World" showcases citizen journalism. Not-formally-journalists found the guilty of the MH17 Malaysian plane shootdown via Facebook and proved the crime. Bastian Obermayer, the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" journalist who revealed "The Panama Papers" will be the guest after the film. 9 Polish films are to premiere at the festival. That includes debut "Diagnosis" which talks about the city of Łódź as if of a human psyche. Another screening with a guest will be around a film about a Jewish landlord of a tenement in Złota Street, Warsaw who really cares about his tenants, yet his tenement will be probably taken over by Jaki's commission. The film will feature the inhabitants and different views of the situation. Loznitsa will be hosted as well. His documentary "The Trial" tackles the issue of engineers and economists put on Stalin's trials. Another guest is Alan Tieger who was one of the prosecutors at the trial of "the Butcher of the Balkans". Another invited documentary film protagonist is Doris Wagner who started the #nunstoo movement. There are going to be debates, among others after "Anthropocene: The Human Epoch" and after "Push" - this one will focus on the housing space and flats treated as goods or as a human right. Other curious films are: "Anders, Me and His 23 Other Women" - about a handsome Swede with a calendar and "Buddy" - about human-dog relationships.

AQUARELA


Watchable. Interesting but feels a bit lengthy. Shot at 96 frames per second and in Atmos 7.1 sound, it's a 89'-long painting of water in its 3 states of matter: solid, liquid and vapour. From Lake Baikal in Siberia and Saqqak in Greenland, through the Atlantic Ocean to the tropical zone, ending at Venezuelan Salto Angel. With sounds of nature as well as rock music and a classical score. Its main focus is on accidents and natural disasters and in this matter it does its utmost to put the viewer, partly through the state-of-the-art Atmos 7.1 sound, right in the middle of the elements. Some images are like nothing I've seen before, some are simply awe-inspiring but several feel protracted and just yawn-inspiring. The focus is clearly on climate change, as indicated in the remark about ice getting too thin to drive on 3 weeks earlier than usual. Still, the film's a painting extended in time rather than a cautionary tale.