DIRECTORS’ DEBUTS COMPETITION 2018 LINE-UP!

Friday October 12th, 2018

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.

**********

53 Wars

It is widely known that the life of a war correspondent is filled with noble and exciting causes, such as informing the world about what’s happening in the most dangerous places on Earth, but at the same time they are permanently exposed to the depths of human decay, which more often than not results in emotional trauma. What kind of conflicts, though, unfold in the minds of the brave war correspondents’ wives, who have to wait for weeks, months even, for their husbands’ return, knowing that with each and every war, the distance between them increases? The film is set in Poland in the 1990s – still before the invasion of electronic devices and mobile phones. Feeble Anna awaits the arrival of Witek, who is better at saving the world than resuscitating their marriage. Not knowing how to put her mind at ease, Anna can only wonder if this time, some anonymous conflict will make her a hopeless widow. But Witek comes back time and again, though somewhat different – as is Anna, who never went to war but feels like a burned out veteran.

Original title: 53 wojny
Director: Ewa Bukowska
Cinematographer: Tomasz Naumiuk

Produced by: Studio Munka

Polish distributor: NEXT FILM SP. z o.o.
Country and year: Poland, 2018

Angel Face

Marlène is a thirty-something hedonist who has never grown out of her excessive lifestyle – wild parties till dawn, experimenting with everything and everyone, and not giving a damn about what the next morning will bring, apart from a killer hangover. Elli is a clever and determined eight-year-old looking desperately for someone she can talk to about her emotions but instead starts to explore the world of adults and heavy drinkers. Marlène’s problems stem from her immaturity and juvenile behaviour, though there is still time left on the clock, and everything could be fixed with some solid detox therapy. Elli, though, is in a much more dangerous situation – as a precocious girl whose life has been revolving around different forms of addiction for as long as she can remember, she will have to learn the hard way how to distinguish the socially accepted boundaries between having fun in life and pissing her life away. How are these two stories connected, then? Simple, Marlène and Elli are mother and daughter.

Original title: Gueule d'Ange
Director: Vanessa Filho
Cinematographer: Guillaume Schiffman
Produced by: Mars Films, Windy Production, Moana Films, Van Vuong Group, My Unity Production
Country and year: France, 2018

Ash

Two heinous crimes, the first one precise, almost like an execution, the second – sloppy, careless, filled with rage. A police investigation that lasts over a decade, leading the investigator to both an obsession with finding clues and mental exhaustion. An unconventional friendship across social divisions, born out of an attraction to the moral ambiguity of Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection, a century-old Russian novel only seemingly out of touch with the modern China and its citizens. Three grown men tangled in a world in which nothing is what it seems and what seems a solution easily becomes another riddle, far more difficult to decode than the previous one. On top of that, dozens of questions that do not have obvious answers. Where does the line between right and wrong, good and evil lie? Can a respected altruist who is often considered a role model be a manipulative opportunist and cold-blooded murderer? Does a ruthless boor who hurt many women deserve to die, or should he be dealt with in a more civilised manner?

Original title: Zhui zong
Director: Xiaofeng Li
Cinematographer: Joewi Verhoeven
Produced by: Beijing BHBD Cultural Diffusion
Country and year: China, 2017

Boy Erased

This is the true story of Jared Conlon, a young American sent by his deeply religious Baptist parents to undergo unorthodox “conversion therapy” to heal him from what was and still is considered an abomination: homosexual desires. Jared does not know what to think or feel, and so he accepts being locked up for weeks in order to be “cured” and become a “valuable” member of society once again. Whilst there, he meets other young people, similarly voluntarily incapacitated because they are too weak to rebel against the world their parents want them to live in. Among them, there are those who really want to be “normal” again, but also some who have learned to lie in order to placate their “saviours”. Living a life of submission to the rules of others, especially the passive-aggressive staff, Jared tries to understand who he is and what he wants to be. How much he is willing to sacrifice to satisfy his parents’ and society’s vision of him?

Polish title: Wymazać siebie
Director: Joel Edgerton
Cinematographer: Eduard Grau
Produced by: Blue-Tongue Films, Focus Features, Perfect World Pictures, Anonymous Content
Polish distributor: United International Pictures Sp. z o.o. (UIP Polska)
Country and year: USA, 2018

Call for Dreams

If dreams are thinly veiled projections of one’s consciousness, expressions of the dreamer’s hopes, fears, desires, and disillusions – does that mean making them physical and real will materialise the things they are a response to? Eko is an inconspicuous woman living in an apartment building hopelessly lost in the guts of a giant metropolis. While observing, through the nonchalant rain, the nocturnal spectacle of light that makes Tokyo seem feverishly unreal, Eko decides to place a curious ad in a local newspaper. In it, she encourages readers to call her and describe their dreams in detail. Then, she pays them a visit and transforms their lyrical or perverted fantasies into tangible form. She exists in limbo – a state of confusion somewhere between the reality and the illusion of the imaginations of others, and soon the woman loses herself in her new passion. Will she be strong enough to escape this sophisticated trap of the senses?

Director: Ran Slavin
Cinematographers: Maayan Blech, Neil Cohen, Yuri Gershberg, Ran Slavin
Produced by: Plan B, Nocturnal Rainbow Films
Country and year: Israel, Japan, 2018

Guilty, The

A bored police alarm dispatcher answers emergency calls with profound indifference. Sometimes the caller is a guy who’s taken far too many drugs and has no idea why the world is crumbling before his eyes, and sometimes it’s a man who’s been mugged in his own BMW by a prostitute. It’s a day like any other, one might say – at least to those who deal with such calls on a daily basis. But for Asger Holm – a tough police officer suspended from duty – it’s the worst punishment possible. Everything changes when he answers an emergency call from an exasperated woman speaking in code so as not to alarm her kidnapper, behind the wheel of a car going god knows where. Using his field experience, the cop starts a race against time with a criminal without a face or a motive. Realising the many limitations the situation imposes on him, Holm decides to cross some borders.

Original title: Den Skyldige
Polish title: Winni
Director: Gustav Möller
Cinematographer: Jasper J. Spanning
Produced by: Nordisk Film Spring
Polish distributor: GUTEK Film Sp. z o.o.
Country and year: Denmark, 2018

Happy Prince, The

Broken, miserable, and with his health rapidly declining, Oscar Wilde left Reading Prison a human wreck. He was sentenced to serve two years of hard labour there for gross indecency with men. His career never recovered, and he was forced to spend his final years in a mediocre Paris hotel, hiding under the false name Sebastian Melmoth. The film recounts this particular period of Wilde’s life, when the penniless, hopeless writer, a mere shell of the golden-mouthed aesthete he’d been not that long ago, tried to deal with his astonishing fall, while the people who once had loved and admired him for his wit, talent and joie de vivre now turned their backs on him. Recounting the memories of his former life, especially the images of the fleeting happiness of the time he spent with his children, Wilde slowly accepts the fact that his world is coming to an end. Unable to simply forget about the myriad things that made him who he was, he puts up a good fight against life’s many injustices.

Director: Rupert Everett
Cinematographer: John Conroy
Produced by: maze pictures GmbH
Country and year: Germany, Belgium, Italy, 2018

In Syria

In war-torn Damascus, life stopped being normal a long time ago. This is the story of how a group of women, children and a feeble old man try to support each other and lead a normal life in the chaos of war. They talk about the past and their plans for the foreseeable future. They quarrel about who should use the toilet or have a bath, and they run into the kitchen, chanting when they hear bullets in the air and bombs falling from the sky. They support each other while under attack from a sniper and brutal raiding parties. This is a film about war, but not the war of soldiers fighting each other to their last breath, nor a war of politicians and their machinations. This is a war seen through the eyes of civilians struggling for sanity despite the fact that the world around them is coming to an end.

Original title: Insyriated
Polish title: W czterech ścianach życia
Director: Philippe Van Leeuw
Cinematographer: Virginie Surdej
Produced by: Liaison Cinematographique, Altitude 100 Production, BE TV, Films Boutique
Country and year: Belgium, France, Lebanon, 2017

Iron Orchard, The

The year is 1939. Europe prepares for war, while the United States slowly overcomes the trauma of the Great Depression. Young and ambitious, Jim McNeely arrives in Texas – a state gushing with oil and filled with the bodies and broken minds of men who once dreamt of riches. Jim has something to prove to all the parents of pretty girls who refuse to let their daughters marry boys from lower classes. His Texan adventure initially consists of blood, sweat, and tears in addition to long working hours in scorching sun and cold nights being insulted by fellow workers. But Jim seems to have what it takes to get to the top of the oil chain and conquer this brave new world of tough, relentless men and beautiful women who will do everything in their power not to become merely trophy wives. On his way up, Jim meets a wide variety of people – including at least several types of righteous men, eccentrics, and scumbags – who came to this unwelcoming land, tarnished with unfulfilled plans and dreams, for the same thing he did.

Director: Ty Roberts
Cinematographer: Mathieu Plainfossé

Produced by: Santa Rita Pictures, Wildcatters Network
Country and year: USA, 2018

Revolver Mind

Redemption – a very broad concept that, in our story, encompasses both a desire to amend for at least some of the horrors one was responsible for at school, and an attempt to repent for taking someone’s life. For each of the three protagonists, redemption means something entirely different. Twenty years ago, Mario killed a Mexican presidential candidate, but now, after being released from prison, he wants to make a new start, though he is appalled by the realisation that the country hasn’t changed much. Jennifer is a homeless American who finds a pistol – a stylish revolver – and has to travel all the way to Mexico to sell it on the black market. But fate gives her a hard time. Chicali is a young but already experienced Tijuana cop who starts working as an assassin for the local mafia while avoiding the realisation that he has passed the point of no return. Their paths intertwine in a surprising way, but nothing will shift the burden of responsibility for their own lives.

Original title: Mente Revólver
Director: Alejandro Ramírez Corona
Cinematographer: Víctor Dávila Camacho
Produced by: Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía - Mexican Film Institute (IMCINE)
Country and year: Mexico, 2017