- Occupation
Producer, Director - Country
Poland
Kamienski Jaroslaw
Lobotomy is Yuri Khashchavatski's personal indictment of the Russian media's brainwashing tactics. Taking the recent war between Russia and Georgia as a point of departure, he illustrates how far removed actual events were from the conflict as it was reported on Russian state television. The director's own voice drives the argument, but journalists, military experts and politicians also have their say. The film intersperses interviews (live or via Skype) with archive footage that is, in turn, contrasted with amateur clips found on the Internet. Khashchavatski contends that "Montage is a powerful and insidious weapon." And he would be the one to know, because in addition to directing the film, he also edited it and its highly effective audio mix. He is a master of the art of irony as well. This personal account by the director suggests that the Russian state is not being governed according to democratic principles, but by a Mafia-style hierarchy.
The One Who Has Hit
The One Who Has Hit is a story of the sharpest shooter in the Vietnam campaign Louis Jurkowlaniec, whose father was Polish. The lead headed his special sniper command for three years, his trials and tribulations were described in the celebrated monograph Secret Army, Secret War, edited by Admiral J.T. Netter. This film is not a record of the glorious deeds of the famous master trooper, but an unveiling of the drama of a man who wants to become to terms with his own extremely cruel and tragic past. It is a Poland that he looks for strength to face up to his reckonig, teh homeland of his father, where he ahs decided to live till the end of his days.
Kill the Day
An ordinary village in Belarusian Palessje. An old pair, Antanina and her husband Viktar, sit knee by knee in their small village hut, decorated with home-made cloths. He drinks badly and wonders “what does one live in this world for?” It is very sad and gloomy in winter, but when the spring comes, the nature revives, and so do the people and the animals. Life goes on. But why does the old woman sigh so heavily? A very colorful and realistic image of old-time people microcosm. Sometimes amusing, sometimes tragic. There is swearing, quarrelling, disagreement; and at the same time harmonious coexistence of people and nature, man and woman.
Earth
There are places where the WW II is not over yet. On the former battlefields, which are now covered with woods, thousands of Soviet soldiers lie unburied. Every year some volunteers come there to search for these human remains. They do that so that they could bury them properly. While they dig out the bones in order to bury them again, the apparently absurd cycle earns a new purpose. The Earth does not only reveal the past, as the forest ghosts are rising from an archive footage like spirits of the soldiers killed seventy years ago. It is transforming it to the future, as the teenagers, who have been brought there by their parents, face death for the first time in their live, although they start playing war games on the spot. The film is an elegy which, one more time, reminds one of frailty of human existence.
Plac Powstancow Warszawy 7
00-999 Warszawa