Post by Bonobo on Feb 25, 2017 20:42:46 GMT 1
Agnieszka Holland wins Silver Bear at Berlin Film Festival
19.02.2017 08:30
Polish director Agnieszka Holland won the Silver Bear Alfred Bauer prize at the Berlin Film Festival on Saturday for her thriller 'Pokot' (Spoor).
Agnieszka Holland and Kasia Adamik.
The movie opened the film festival and received enthusiastic reviews.
Holland came on stage to receive the prize together with her daughter Kasia Adamik and thanked her for collaborating on the film.
Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi won the Golden Bear for "On Body and Soul"
variety.com/2017/film/markets-festivals/spoor-review-berlinale-2017-1201985392/
Agnieszka Holland's new film is a wintry small-town murder mystery that's like a Polish 'Fargo' — or at least it would be if the movie made more sense.
The central character of Agnieszka Holland’s “Spoor” is a lonely, moon-faced schoolteacher who lives in a mountain village near the border of Poland and the Czech Republic and insists on being called by her last name: Duszejko. Each morning, she rises in the country and greets the sun with her two dogs, then whiles away the day. It’s a quiet life, in the kind of setting where not much happens. Or, at least, that’s how it seems until Duszejko learns that her canine companions have gone missing, at which point the film starts to introduce its assaultively colorful cast of characters.
There’s the grizzled poacher next door who keeps his own dog locked in a shed. There’s the swank girl who works in a local boutique and moonlights at a sex club. There’s the baby-faced epileptic computer wizard. There’s the sadistic priest who tells Duszejko that it’s perfectly OK to kill animals, because they “don’t have souls.” There’s the angry hooded police chief who treats her like a criminal. The heart of “Spoor” is set in the wintry wilderness, yet the movie, adapted from a novel called “Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead,” plays as if someone had tried to binge-cram a dozen episodes of a Polish version of “Fargo” into one feature-length film.
Agniezska Madat, who plays Duszejko, is a commanding actress who looks like the earth-mother version of Aileen Wournos. Duszejko, we learn, is a retired civil engineer, though that doesn’t quite square with her hippie-peasant mien. Then again, nothing in the move squares. “Spoor” is a kind of murder mystery, since characters keep showing up dead, and the audience has a theoretical interest in discovering the identity of the woodland serial killer who is apparently responsible. The victims are all local hunters, and every crime scene is marked by tell-tale animal tracks. Beyond that, though, there are no clues; each corpse is another red herring. The movie is murky and disjointed, held together not so much by what happens as by a vague atmosphere of obsession.
Duszejko is an astrology freak, as well as a devoted defender of animals rights, and she seems to have chosen the right place to live. The country locale of “Spoor” is crawling with indigenous species — deer and wild boar, badgers and polecats. We see them scurrying through the woods, and occasionally one of the critters shows up bloody and dead, which is enough to cause Duszejko to weep in agony. She’s a mixture of squishy feeling and crusading righteousness, and she is also one of those protagonists who can be classified as an unreliable narrator. Yet in “Spoor,” the real unreliable narrator is Agnieszka Holland. Scene for scene, she stages the film with confidence and a feeling for mood, yet nothing in it hangs together.
Beneath the lurches in logic, the episodic storyline that never gets going, one discerns the fuzzy outlines of a “vision.” Men are hunters and stalkers. Religion is a lie that pretends to have compassion but doesn’t recognize all of God’s creatures. It’s up to women, who pose as the passive ones, to right the wrongs of the universe with their secretive action. The best thing in “Spoor” is Madat’s performance; she makes Duszejko a figure of equal parts love and rage. Yet the movie is the sort of mess that seems to keep starting over, and you may wind up wishing that you could transport the character to a better film, one that wasn’t too busy undercutting the audience to give it something to rely on.
www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2017/02/pokot
"Pokot”Agnieszka Holland’s new film is a subtle ecological thriller
A fascinating addition to a multifaceted career
Prospero
Feb 15th 2017
by J.W.
AGNIESZKA HOLLAND’S career spans four decades and crosses multiple territories. “Angry Harvest” (1985), a drama in German, explores the life of a Jewish woman sheltered from persecution in 1942 by a peasant. She directed “The Secret Garden” (1993) in English, an adaptation of a classic children’s story by Frances Hodgson Burnett. She turned her hand to the work of Henry James in “Washington Square” (1997) and has made three films with Ed Harris, an American actor. But she is notorious for her work in Polish; “Fever” (1981) and “A Lonely Woman” (1981) were banned by Poland’s communist regime, and she fled the country shortly after. Today she divides her time between Los Angeles, Brittany and Warsaw.
Extremely hard to categorise, Ms Holland’s work ranges in style and straddles genres. She scrutinises complex, often compromised, characters and tells their stories in a broad historical context, but no two stories are the same. In recent years she has widened her filmography, breaking into television by directing episodes of “The Wire” and of the American remake of “The Killing”. Now, in a new democratic era for Poland, she has really come home and returned to her preferred medium. “Pokot” (“Spoor”, referring to the track or scent of an animal) is a present-day psychodrama about Janina Duszejko (Agnieszka Mandat), a woman in her 60s who becomes suspicious after neighbours and acquaintances are murdered in mysterious circumstances.
Ms Mandat, known in Poland for her stage work, dominates the two and a half hours. She is wonderful in her character’s deranged conviction that the murderers are animals taking revenge for being hunted (her two dogs disappear early in the film). As the police become increasingly wary of her, Janina seeks the assistance of a kindly neighbour and a geeky computer whiz to identify the animal-perpetrators. Taking place against the stunning backdrop of south-western Poland, “Pokot” blends an unconventional whodunit with questions of animal rights and human cruelty. The result is a beautiful rural thriller, the likes of which Ms Holland has not attempted before.
The absorbing and often funny screenplay is the result of collaboration between Ms Holland and novelist Olga Tokarczuk. It takes Ms Tokarczuk’s bestselling thriller “Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych” (“Drive your plough over the bones of the dead”) as its basis, though the screenplay differs in density from the novel. There, Janina is obsessed by astrology—mildly shown in the film—and Ms Tokarczuk’s fascination for and fun with psychological theory cannot, by nature, translate on to the screen. “Olga wrote the first draft of the script,” Ms Holland says, “which I took apart, critically. She was very humble about it. Turning the book into a movie together was not easy. It went through many drafts until we arrived at something understandable.”
How does Ms Holland characterise the film? “It certainly does not have a traditional dramatic structure,” she says. “It is something between genres—a thriller, yes, but in some ways not. I think of it more as a feminist, ecological, anarchistic tale.” In eluding an obvious category, it resembles Ms Holland’s most unsung film, “The Third Miracle”, a compelling story about the reawakening of faith in a troubled priest (Mr Harris), which premiered at the Berlinale in 2000 but which more or less vanished thereafter. “Pokot”, thankfully, is unlikely to suffer the same fate.
In a press conference in Berlin, Ms Tokarzcuk focused on the film’s feminism and the iniquities of hunting. “I could have chosen to write about the industrial production of meat,” she said, “but hunting is spectacular and, for me, a metaphor for the domination of the weak. It is a very male hobby. Political decisions are taken on the hunt. In ‘Pokot’, women and nature fight back.”
Yet the film is not intensely political; it is thoroughly enjoyable, if formally unusual, and poses seemingly unsolvable riddles. Three brilliant Polish women—director, novelist and actress—have brought to Berlin what might fairly be dubbed an ecological fairytale. It promises to be one of the most talked-about festival entries for years.
19.02.2017 08:30
Polish director Agnieszka Holland won the Silver Bear Alfred Bauer prize at the Berlin Film Festival on Saturday for her thriller 'Pokot' (Spoor).
Agnieszka Holland and Kasia Adamik.
The movie opened the film festival and received enthusiastic reviews.
Holland came on stage to receive the prize together with her daughter Kasia Adamik and thanked her for collaborating on the film.
Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi won the Golden Bear for "On Body and Soul"
variety.com/2017/film/markets-festivals/spoor-review-berlinale-2017-1201985392/
Agnieszka Holland's new film is a wintry small-town murder mystery that's like a Polish 'Fargo' — or at least it would be if the movie made more sense.
The central character of Agnieszka Holland’s “Spoor” is a lonely, moon-faced schoolteacher who lives in a mountain village near the border of Poland and the Czech Republic and insists on being called by her last name: Duszejko. Each morning, she rises in the country and greets the sun with her two dogs, then whiles away the day. It’s a quiet life, in the kind of setting where not much happens. Or, at least, that’s how it seems until Duszejko learns that her canine companions have gone missing, at which point the film starts to introduce its assaultively colorful cast of characters.
There’s the grizzled poacher next door who keeps his own dog locked in a shed. There’s the swank girl who works in a local boutique and moonlights at a sex club. There’s the baby-faced epileptic computer wizard. There’s the sadistic priest who tells Duszejko that it’s perfectly OK to kill animals, because they “don’t have souls.” There’s the angry hooded police chief who treats her like a criminal. The heart of “Spoor” is set in the wintry wilderness, yet the movie, adapted from a novel called “Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead,” plays as if someone had tried to binge-cram a dozen episodes of a Polish version of “Fargo” into one feature-length film.
Agniezska Madat, who plays Duszejko, is a commanding actress who looks like the earth-mother version of Aileen Wournos. Duszejko, we learn, is a retired civil engineer, though that doesn’t quite square with her hippie-peasant mien. Then again, nothing in the move squares. “Spoor” is a kind of murder mystery, since characters keep showing up dead, and the audience has a theoretical interest in discovering the identity of the woodland serial killer who is apparently responsible. The victims are all local hunters, and every crime scene is marked by tell-tale animal tracks. Beyond that, though, there are no clues; each corpse is another red herring. The movie is murky and disjointed, held together not so much by what happens as by a vague atmosphere of obsession.
Duszejko is an astrology freak, as well as a devoted defender of animals rights, and she seems to have chosen the right place to live. The country locale of “Spoor” is crawling with indigenous species — deer and wild boar, badgers and polecats. We see them scurrying through the woods, and occasionally one of the critters shows up bloody and dead, which is enough to cause Duszejko to weep in agony. She’s a mixture of squishy feeling and crusading righteousness, and she is also one of those protagonists who can be classified as an unreliable narrator. Yet in “Spoor,” the real unreliable narrator is Agnieszka Holland. Scene for scene, she stages the film with confidence and a feeling for mood, yet nothing in it hangs together.
Beneath the lurches in logic, the episodic storyline that never gets going, one discerns the fuzzy outlines of a “vision.” Men are hunters and stalkers. Religion is a lie that pretends to have compassion but doesn’t recognize all of God’s creatures. It’s up to women, who pose as the passive ones, to right the wrongs of the universe with their secretive action. The best thing in “Spoor” is Madat’s performance; she makes Duszejko a figure of equal parts love and rage. Yet the movie is the sort of mess that seems to keep starting over, and you may wind up wishing that you could transport the character to a better film, one that wasn’t too busy undercutting the audience to give it something to rely on.
www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2017/02/pokot
"Pokot”Agnieszka Holland’s new film is a subtle ecological thriller
A fascinating addition to a multifaceted career
Prospero
Feb 15th 2017
by J.W.
AGNIESZKA HOLLAND’S career spans four decades and crosses multiple territories. “Angry Harvest” (1985), a drama in German, explores the life of a Jewish woman sheltered from persecution in 1942 by a peasant. She directed “The Secret Garden” (1993) in English, an adaptation of a classic children’s story by Frances Hodgson Burnett. She turned her hand to the work of Henry James in “Washington Square” (1997) and has made three films with Ed Harris, an American actor. But she is notorious for her work in Polish; “Fever” (1981) and “A Lonely Woman” (1981) were banned by Poland’s communist regime, and she fled the country shortly after. Today she divides her time between Los Angeles, Brittany and Warsaw.
Extremely hard to categorise, Ms Holland’s work ranges in style and straddles genres. She scrutinises complex, often compromised, characters and tells their stories in a broad historical context, but no two stories are the same. In recent years she has widened her filmography, breaking into television by directing episodes of “The Wire” and of the American remake of “The Killing”. Now, in a new democratic era for Poland, she has really come home and returned to her preferred medium. “Pokot” (“Spoor”, referring to the track or scent of an animal) is a present-day psychodrama about Janina Duszejko (Agnieszka Mandat), a woman in her 60s who becomes suspicious after neighbours and acquaintances are murdered in mysterious circumstances.
Ms Mandat, known in Poland for her stage work, dominates the two and a half hours. She is wonderful in her character’s deranged conviction that the murderers are animals taking revenge for being hunted (her two dogs disappear early in the film). As the police become increasingly wary of her, Janina seeks the assistance of a kindly neighbour and a geeky computer whiz to identify the animal-perpetrators. Taking place against the stunning backdrop of south-western Poland, “Pokot” blends an unconventional whodunit with questions of animal rights and human cruelty. The result is a beautiful rural thriller, the likes of which Ms Holland has not attempted before.
The absorbing and often funny screenplay is the result of collaboration between Ms Holland and novelist Olga Tokarczuk. It takes Ms Tokarczuk’s bestselling thriller “Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych” (“Drive your plough over the bones of the dead”) as its basis, though the screenplay differs in density from the novel. There, Janina is obsessed by astrology—mildly shown in the film—and Ms Tokarczuk’s fascination for and fun with psychological theory cannot, by nature, translate on to the screen. “Olga wrote the first draft of the script,” Ms Holland says, “which I took apart, critically. She was very humble about it. Turning the book into a movie together was not easy. It went through many drafts until we arrived at something understandable.”
How does Ms Holland characterise the film? “It certainly does not have a traditional dramatic structure,” she says. “It is something between genres—a thriller, yes, but in some ways not. I think of it more as a feminist, ecological, anarchistic tale.” In eluding an obvious category, it resembles Ms Holland’s most unsung film, “The Third Miracle”, a compelling story about the reawakening of faith in a troubled priest (Mr Harris), which premiered at the Berlinale in 2000 but which more or less vanished thereafter. “Pokot”, thankfully, is unlikely to suffer the same fate.
In a press conference in Berlin, Ms Tokarzcuk focused on the film’s feminism and the iniquities of hunting. “I could have chosen to write about the industrial production of meat,” she said, “but hunting is spectacular and, for me, a metaphor for the domination of the weak. It is a very male hobby. Political decisions are taken on the hunt. In ‘Pokot’, women and nature fight back.”
Yet the film is not intensely political; it is thoroughly enjoyable, if formally unusual, and poses seemingly unsolvable riddles. Three brilliant Polish women—director, novelist and actress—have brought to Berlin what might fairly be dubbed an ecological fairytale. It promises to be one of the most talked-about festival entries for years.