DIRECTORS' DEBUTS COMPETITION 2016 LINE-UP!

Monday October 17th, 2016

Directors’ Debuts Competition was initiated in 2010 due to the Festival’s increasing openness to the noteworthy artists and the new film phenomena they create. The idea of creating additional competition sections was a natural consequence of our previous activities. For years we have been promoting innovative projects that combine intellectual freedom, remarkable insight into world affairs and a desire to inspire other artists of the screen.

Directors’ Debuts Competition brings new discoveries: great movies of high artistic value and great filmmakers whose new ventures surprise not only the Jury members but all audiences around the world as well.

Competition is under the patronage of Polish Filmmakers Association.

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Agony

A twenty-something student murders his girlfriend without any apparent reason, then cuts her into pieces and throws her into a dumpster. A fourteen-year-old girl attacks her mother with a knife just because she was not allowed to use the internet. These crimes presented by the film were very specific and yet undefined, undoubtedly for myriads of reasons that get lost in the mundanity of everyday life. Agony tells two parallel stories of young men who are forced by adult life to negotiate their dreams and desires with an indifferent world. Can their souls be tainted by evil too? On the one hand, they are very similar: neither has the support of a father figure; neither knows how to vent their sexual tensions. On the other hand, they come from completely different worlds and seem to be driven by entirely different things. This is a film about them, and their generation, as well as – quite simply – about the human nature.

Original title: Agonie
Director: David Clay Diaz
Cinematographer: Julian Krubasik

Produced by: Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München - University of Television and Film Munich (HFF München)
Austria, Germany, 2016

All We Had

An unemployed alcoholic who can’t seem to find her place in the world escapes with her teenage daughter from the umpteenth man to mistreat them badly. As they look for the next town and a different version of the same old story, Rita and Ruthie go on yet another odyssey of petty theft and exploitation of the kindness shown by those who naively try to help them. They sleep in their car, dreaming of a better future, and support each other in every challenging situation. Mother and daughter against the world. But eventually Rita and Ruthie are forced to face the music and stand before the very people they were trying to con, which could – but may not – become their new beginning. All We Had is the story of an unbreakable bond between mother and daughter, and at the same time a tale of good people who get lost and forget who they were, waiting for something that will never come – at least not in the shape they hope for.

Original title: All We Had
Director: Katie Holmes
Cinematographer: Brett Pawlak

Produced by: Mustard & Co
USA, 2016

Aloys

Aloys Adorn is a private detective who has lost his will to live after his father’s death. He tries to fill the existential void with a series of repetitive actions and gestures, as well as a voyeuristic streak that his job demands of him, while living in permanent emotional and physical isolation. But then, one day Aloys unexpectedly meets a woman who wants to change his way of thinking. Well, he meets Vera over the phone when she invites him to participate in a game of imagination called ‘phone walking’. It goes like this: one person opens the other’s mind through the power of voice and verbal suggestion, thus establishing a connection, devoid of imperfect physicality, which will enable both of them to go on exciting virtual adventures and become better versions of themselves. Aloys is an innovative drama that poses a series of questions about the limitations of the human psyche and the power of imagination to both build bridges of understanding and walls of ignorance.

Original title: Aloys
Director: Tobias Nölle
Cinematographer: Simon Guy Fässler

Produced by: Hugofilm Productions GmbH

Polish distributor: Solopan Sp. z o. o.
Switzerland, France, 2016

Apprentice

Aiman and Suhaila are siblings staying in a modest housing estate in Singapore, living most of their lives in the shadow of the crimes committed by their father. When he was a teenager, Aiman fell in with a bad crowd and it was only the discipline of the military that helped him to conquer his inner demons. In the beginning of the film, he starts working as a correctional officer in a maximum security prison. He could easily have become one of the convicts in his youth, so he hopes to help those who have repented their sins and wish to change. Aiman begins to develop a relationship with Rahim, the prison’s long-time executioner who has been hanging people for a few decades now, as Singapore’s law still permits the death penalty. After a while he begins to help Rahim with his job. Apprentice is not a story of the penal system, nor a sharp political accusation, but a film about people who live with death every single day, trying to give it a bit of dignity.

Original title: Apprentice
Director: Boo Junfeng
Cinematographer: Benoît Soler

Produced by: Zhao wei Films, Augenschein Filmproduktion GmbH, Akanga Film Productions, Cinémadefacto, Peanut Pictures

Polish distributor: Aurora Films
Singapore, Germany, France, 2016

Between Sea and Land

Colombia’s northern coast, on the edge of the Caribbean Sea. A row of open-air shacks stand on piles driven into the water. The poor who can’t afford to live in the city reside here. Alberto is a young man who as a child was diagnosed with dystonia, a neurological movement disorder that leads to the atrophy of muscles in the whole body. The man is forever confined to his bed, constant accompanied by a life-support machine. His only way to see the outside world is through a mirror on a stick he holds in his mouth, thus making him painfully aware he is so close to the sea, and yet so far from it. His whole world revolves around his loving mother, who does her best to make her son’s life bearable. However, Alberto is also often visited by his attractive childhood friend, Giselle, who constantly reminds him of the physical prison he lives in and will never leave. Despite all of this, Between Sea and Land is a tale of hope and boundless love between mother and son.

Original title: La Cienaga - Entre el Mar y la Tierra
Director: Manolo Cruz, Carlos Del Castillo
Cinematography: Robespierre Rodriguez
Produced by: Mago Films

Colombia, 2016

Delivery

Delivery invites the viewer on a journey into the depths of the endless Colombian forests, whose cyclical nature hides many secrets. This is a place which is modern and ancient at the same time; it has existed practically unchanged for centuries, out of the reach of the human species, which seems to insist on destroying the planet. Among the trees’ greens and bronzes, and the navy blues of the nearby river, which has been running its course for thousands of years, there stands a small house. It is modest, it leaks here and there, and it is the only proof of human existence for hundreds of kilometres around. The group of people who live here, at the very heart of the Colombian forest, make ends meet by fishing, harvesting corn, and living in symbiosis with nature. They are still strangers there, though they could not imagine living anywhere else. The film’s protagonist is Helena, who awaits the birth of her child, an event that will mark the continuation of the endless circle of life.

Original title: Nacimiento
Director: Martin Mejia Rugeles
Cinematographer: Nicolas Canniccioni

Produced by: Martin Mejia Rugeles, Yoreinare Producciones
Colombia, 2015

Demons, The

Montreal’s suburbs, seemingly tranquil, idyllic even, though pulsating with restless, often negative, energy within the houses it encompasses – the kind of energy that cannot find a vent in mundane everydayness. The place, which is exactly the same as hundreds of other suburbs, is full of more or less satisfied families, aggressively maturing teenagers, and kids only beginning to recognise the hardships of life. Among them is Félix, the film’s ten-year-old protagonist, a kind and helpful, though oversensitive, boy who sometimes reacts with cruelty to family or school problems, but in other ways is as normal as his peers. However, he is constantly exposed to the workings of external forces he does not understand, but which make the world he lives in go round. The Demons is a precise exploration of all the evil and imperfections hidden in the human soul that are being passed from one generation to the other, imposed by a society upon an individual, transferred from parents to children.

Original title: Les démons
Director: Philippe Lesage
Cinematographer: Nicolas Canniccioni

Produced by: Productions l'unité centrale, Les Films de l'Autre
Canada, 2015

Lady Macbeth

Nineteenth-century Great Britain. Katherine is a young woman who is married to an older, wealthy land owner, though she becomes a lady in name only. For her fate is to live in a world of men who treat her purely as a pretty decoration. Something pleasurable to look at, or be turned on by, or to brag about once in a while, but devoid of any signs of free will. Not to mention ambitions, desires, or dreams. Bored to death with her meaningless existence in her husband’s suffocatingly bland house, Katherine uses every opportunity to take a breath of some freedom on the nearby moors. With each subsequent day she succumbs to emotional stagnation and despair. Lady Macbeth is not, however, a tale of submission to patriarchy. When Katherine meets Sebastian, her husband’s audacious, provocative new worker who does not shy away from showing off his masculinity, the woman’s transformation begins. Gradually, with each irretrievable decision, she earns the titular comparison.

Original title: Lady Macbeth
Director: William Oldroyd
Cinematographer: Ari Wegner

Produced by: iFeatures, Sixty Six Pictures
UK, 2016

Last Family, The

Warsaw, 1977. Tomek Beksiński, a popular music critic and film translator, moves to a new flat. Nearby, in the same housing estate, live his parents – his mother Zofia, who is concerned about her son’s oversensitivity and eccentricity, and his father Zdzisław, an outstanding painter with a remarkable personality. The film shows the dramatic life of the family, which also includes Zofia’s and Zdzisław’s mothers.

Polish title: Ostatnia rodzina
Director: Jan P. Matuszyński
Cinematographer: Kacper Fertacz

Produced by: Aurum Film Bodzak Hickinbotham Sp. j.

Polish distributor: KINO ŚWIAT Sp. z o. o.
Poland, 2016

Miles Ahead

A cinematic impression, breaking most of the rules for by-the-book biopics, of the legendary jazz musician Miles Davis, narrated through multiple time frames and toying with the endless possibilities of genre cinema. A tale in which nothing is for certain, and in which one does not know what was based on facts from Davis’s life and what was created within the bounds of the filmmakers’ imagination. Most of Miles Ahead takes place in 1979, at the very end of a five-year period of silence in the musician’s professional life. But the film also switches fluently between different decades, mixing numerous characters and events from Davis’s life, and adding some completely fictional ones. Jazz sessions are supplemented with car chases, drug-fuelled visions intertwine with gun-blazing, and the non-linear narrative accentuates the influence of Davis’s failed marriage on his artistic identity. The film is a creative interpretation of facts and myths about different sides of Miles Davis.

Original title: Miles Ahead
Director: Don Cheadle
Cinematographer: Roberto Schaefer
Produced by: Sobini Films, Crescendo Productions, Naked City Films, BiFRost Pictures

Polish distributor: United International Pictures Sp. z o. o. (UIP Poland)

USA, 2015