Rzepka Agata

10 Years to Nashville
Iza is a 33 year-old cleaning lady in a Polish railway station. Her friend Mariusz owns a railway toilet. Together, they dream of traveling to America, to Manhattan and then to Nashville, to see "country music USA." Iza loves country music and dreams of performing in front of a Nashville audience. But she and Mariusz do not speak English, their knowledge of foreign countries is weak, and they are comically naive. Yet their optimism and determination is worth admiration. This is a story about dreams, and about two outsiders for whom the journey becomes an important path to self-awareness.

XL
Marta, young fat woman strives to find acceptance, love, and ultimately, a permanent life partner and i order to achieve this created a so called FWFLM (“Fat Women Liberation Movement”) which changed her life… Imagine a food store and a short, fat young woman whose name is Marta sneaking in with a pink envelope in her hand. The envelope contains a letter she has just written… Marta stands on her toes, puts the envelope on the counter… and runs away. This is a scene that I remember from Marta’s diary, which I found on her webb.site: XL-pozytywnie.pl. where we can read than being fat is considered positive. Sorry, not being “fat” but… “fluffy” because everything published there must sound positive. The film which we want to make about Marta and her activity is not going to be another sad tale about the problems of fat people. It is a success story of a strong woman turning her weakness into strength. Had she lived 20 or 30 years ago, she would’ve been a Commissar, running a Party Organisation in Communist Poland. Today she is the head of the so called, Fat Women Liberation Movement she has created. The web-page www.XL-pozytywnie was started and is being run by Marta in order to reach fluffy people all over Poland. There are articles about health, medical treatment, shops with food and clothing for fluffy people, fashion, an internet chat and forum where people can get to know each other and exchange information about their troubles. It seems the most difficult problems fat, young women face is when they start adult life and encounter emotional and sexual challenges. We find all this described very frankly in Marta’s intimate diary published on the page. She writes about her problems with puberty and difficulties in her teenage years also the emotional rejection by her father who did not want to have a fat daughter. Seeking love and acceptance she started dating boys and soon she discovered that it always ended the same way - as a one night stand with a bitter taste after Neither special diets nor starving or fasting helped – her body stayed fat. And finally she managed to persuade herself to accept herself and her body. The recipe is simple: you have to like yourself – your body is beautiful whether it is fat or thin. Soon she had a “normal” i.e. slim boy-friend, got pregnant but found that the man she lived with was not ideal. They split up. And one day, shopping in a food store Marta saw a plump young man, Ernest - and fell in love with him. She understood that she had found what she had been looking for, for a long time. She decided she wanted to marry him. She wrote him a love letter and started dating Ernest, hiding from him that she was pregnant... Her fatness helped her once more. She pretended to go abroad and gave birth to a child. And then she plucked up courage and explained everything to Ernest… and they started living together and got married. But Marta is a born leader so she cannot live only as a wife and mother. She helps other fluffy women to improve their quality of life. She teaches them how to avoid problems or to solve them. She invented a special therapy called photo-therapy. She takes a girl who believes that she is completely unattractive, dresses her beautifully, makes her up and takes photographs, Then she publishes them on the webb.site – and this helps the duckling to become a beautiful swan. She organizes fashion shows for fat women and plans for her webb.site to be in Eglish also. This will help her to establish international contacts with similar organizations and individual fluffy people in neighboring countries. The problem of fatness is common for all the post-communist states that entered the free market economy. People suddenly have access to all the food they want. Unfortunately this is often junk food and so the problem of obesity is becoming more widespread. One may ask why I – a slim man is tackling this issue. Can a thin man like myself ever understand the trauma of fluffy women? My answer is simple. Fat people are like us and they need love and tenderness as we do – and watching them we can see ourselves and our emotional problems more sharply and maybe learn how to solve them.

I have gained my experience working on international films in production such as „Anna Karenina” TV series for Channel 4 (Great Britain), „The Foreigner” and „Out of Reach” for Franchise Pictures (USA), feature documentary for Swedish television “Nina’s Journey” as well as Polish feature film “In Desert and Wilderness” shot in South Africa and Tunisia. After a couple of successful projects produced for corporate entities I have produced a couple of documentaries, among them “Ticket to Nashville”, “Edward’s meaning of life”, “Yes”. creative documentary “Funeral people” “Edward’s meaning of life” feature films – freenlancer works “Nina’s Journey” – Swedish – Polish coproduction “Out of reach” – USA production “The Foreigner” – USA production ‘The Way You Do It With Girls’ – Polish production ‘In Desert And Wilderness’ – Polish production stage performances: „Serenade in Dunajec Valley” achievements: speaker – conference „Project Management as a solution for XXI century – creative project management in film. third price for a screenplay „When Dreams Are Born ...”