POLISH FILMS WITH SPECIAL MENTIONS IN CLERMONT-FERRAND
A short feature by Jan Bujnowski and the document Subtotals by Mohammadrez Farzad received special mentions at this year's International Clermont-Ferrand Festival.
The festival in Clermont-Ferrand for years has enjoyed great esteem among the film community. The selectors choose best short productions to be parts of the competitions, invite numerous guests and organize interesting meetings. This year's 35th edition of the festival took place on January 27 and ended on February 4.
The plot of The Devil by Jan Bujnowski, awarded at the festival, takes place in the 1990s, when in the research conducted by OBOP on the religiosity of Poles, the percentage of believers always oscillated around 95%. At the same time, unemployment rates also went into record highs. The crisis strengthened the need for spirituality, and things which were not necessarily possible in other times started to happen...
The second awarded film is the Polish-Iranian-Algerian co-production Subtotals by Mohammadrez Farzad. In his short documentary, the director asks unusual questions. Have you ever counted your gray hair? How many times have you been in love? Have you ever counted all the houses and flats you've lived in, or the number of kisses you exchanged in your life? And how many times have you dreamed about flying? Perhaps you've never counted it, as the shape of life behind those numbers is not affected by them. Mohammadrez Farzad's film, based on Iranian home archives recorded on 8 mm tape, is a meditation on the variability of life, which cannot be grasped in any calculations. Majmouan (Subtotals) by Mohammadrez Farzad is a film essay inspired by a short story by Gregory Burnham with the same title and the novel Autoportrait by Édouard Levé.
The list of all awarded titles can be found in this appendix.