CINEMATOGRAPHERS’ DEBUTS COMPETITION 2020 LINE-UP!

Wednesday October 21st, 2020

Cinematographers’ 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.

Cinematographers’ 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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ARRACHT

Ireland, 1845. Local farmers and fishermen live in poverty, desperately trying to make ends meet and finding strength in their families and the support of the people they live with. Their existence is harsh and unforgiving and they are forever dependent on nature’s whims and their English landlord’s increasingly oppressive rent, but they try to take joy in little things. When they hear distressing news from the New World about a potato blight that is destroying crops, they have no choice but to believe in their community and their landlord’s common sense. Soon, the Great Famine shatters all illusions. In a few short years, over one million Irish men and women vanish, and another million are forced to emigrate to North America. The rich are interested in their own well-being, while the destitute forget their humanity to feed their loved ones. When it seems that everything is lost, one desperate man saves a traumatised child from certain death, only to realise their evolving relationship may become a symbol of a new beginning.

Director: Tom Sullivan
Cinematographer: Kate McCullough

Produced by: Macalla Teoranta

Country and year: Ireland, 2019

BONE CAGE

Jamie is a young, working-class guy who loves the natural world but at the same time has to clear cut the forests near his home town in Nova Scotia, Canada, to make ends meet. The job is soul-crushing but Jamie tries to use his free time to save animals that survived the man-made devastation. One day he saves a hawk which cannot fly, another day he rescues unhatched eggs. This gives him a sense of purpose he desperately seeks, for Jamie lives in a world devoid of any real perspectives. He dreams of escaping it with his beloved girl but deep down he knows the reality will probably suffocate him. Jamie belongs to yet another lost generation of young people whose wings had been clipped before they could even imagine flying, and whose minds had been additionally burdened by the destruction of the planet they care about. Despite all the hardships, Jamie tries to be cautiously optimistic about what lies ahead. Will he be able to change his stars, or is he already doomed to live, die, and be forgotten just like countless trees he helped to destroy?

Director: Taylor Olson
Cinematographer: Kevin Fraser

Produced by: Melani Wood
Country and year: Canada, 2019

CURSE OF AUDREY EARNSHAW, THE

In 1873, a group of God-fearing Irish immigrants established a colony in North America. During the next hundred years, they lived in cultural and social separation from the rest of the world, thus avoiding the individual and collective traumas of both World Wars and numerous revolutions that permanently changed the surrounding reality. In 1956, something happened that made the community suffer one failure after another. This went on for the next 17 years, resulting in frustration and growing resentment among the people who only wished they could understand why God works in such mysterious ways. The community blames Agatha Earnshaw, the owner of the only farm which did not suffer crop failures or pestilence. Is she a witch who used dark magic to make God angry, or maybe God simply turned His back on the people he once loved? While they look for answers, Agatha has a secret that will turn the community upside down: she has a daughter, 17-year-old Audrey, whose existence she has kept a secret until now. Why is that?

Director: Thomas Robert Lee
Cinematographer: Nick Thomas

Produced by: Gianna Isabella
Country and year: Canada, 2019

INVISIBLE

A car rushes through an empty street at dusk. There is a woman’s body hidden in the back. A man dashes through a forest at night but suddenly stops before a pack of animals. Another man is released from prison after serving time for murdering his wife. The first one is Jonas, an unfulfilled artist. He would do anything to break free from the mundane life of his taxidermist uncle, even if that means pretending to be a brilliant blind dancer to take part in a popular TV dancing competition. The second one is Vytas, a man whose existence was forgotten by a society that could not forgive him ending another person’s existence. Stigmatised by others, rejected by those who were once close to him, he unsuccessfully tries to start a new life, knowing that he will not be able to do so until he atones for his past sins. Two men forever linked by a crime from the past and the lies they live by in the present try to go their own ways in a world based on fantasies and temptations.

Original title: Nematoma

Director: Ignas Jonynas
Cinematographer: Denys Lushchyk

Produced by: Lime Lite, Revoliucijos ideja, Studio Locomotive
Country and year: Lithuania, Latvia, Spain, Ukraine, 2019

MAGNESIUM

Photo by Anna Włoch

The Polish-Soviet borderland was a wild and dangerous place to live during the interwar period – after Poland gained independence as a result of World War I, and before it was deprived of its future during World War II. The film’s borderland is a place filled with vicious bandits and shrewd profiteers with no interest in human life – people who either made their fortunes by force or were forced to die, forgotten. The Levenfish clan, ruled by three vigorous sisters who recently freed themselves from their father’s burdensome patriarchy, is responsible for a lot of pain in this peculiar world. This is a world of unforgiving villains, gun-blazing bastards, degenerate junkies, strange codes of honour, and treasures that make normal people do bad things. A world in which one can find conjoined twins dreaming of money and fame and divergent sexual perversions that leave people perplexed. The film begins with the borderland ruled by tough women with guns, but it is entirely unknown who will rule it when the end credits roll.

Original title: Magnezja

Director: Maciek Bochniak
Cinematographer: Paweł Chorzępa

Produced by: Aurum Film

Polish distributor: Kino Świat

Country and year: Poland, 2020

POPPIE NONGENA

In the 1970s, the Republic of South Africa was not a particularly friendly place for people of a skin colour other than white, though the apartheid had many faces. It was pure hell for some, while others learned to live with it and tried to build a better future for their children. Working as domestic help in a household of an affluent white family, Eunice ‘Poppie’ Nongena thinks she has found her place in this world of different limitations and prohibitions. Even if she cannot walk through ‘white streets’ after dusk, even if she lives in constant fear that someone will kill her on her way home, Poppie hopes for the best, but she is proven wrong. One day, she receives a government notice that she has to leave the country, as, according to a new definition of ‘a citizen’, she is an immigrant in her homeland. Thus, Poppie goes on a Kafkaesque journey of trying to appeal to the common sense of a variety of government officials and lawyers. While she tries to prove that she deserves to live freely in her country, the young generation goes to war with the white regime.

Director: Christiaan Olwagen
Cinematographer: Vicci Turpin
Produced by: Poppie Productions (Pty) Ltd
Country and year: Republic of South Africa, 2019

TWO OF US

Two little girls play hide and seek in the park. One of them hides so well that her friend is not able to find her. Cut. Two older women, Mado and Nina, have a tender conversation in an apartment. It is obvious that they are connected by something more than just a simple friendship, that they have found in each other emotional fulfilment and support in daily struggles with the world’s indifference. There is something that divides them, as well: Mado, always afraid of what other people would say if they knew, decided years ago to start a family. She continued this lie with a man whom she could never love. Nina, on the other hand, wants to shout the truth so loudly that everybody will hear and leave them alone, but she knows she must wait for the right moment. One accidental quarrel puts their ambitious plans – including moving abroad – into question. Will these two girls, hiding in the bodies of older women, be able to find each other once more, or will their decades-long connection break this time?

Original title: Deux
Polish title: My dwie
Director: Filippo Meneghetti
Cinematographer: Aurélien Marra
Produced by: Paprika Films
Polish distributor: Tongariro Releasing Sp. z o.o.
Country and year: France, Luxembourg, Belgium, 2019