DIRECTORS’ DEBUTS COMPETITION 2020 LINE-UP!

Wednesday October 21st, 2020

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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25 YEARS OF INNOCENCE

Photo by Robert Palka

This story should not have happened in real life, and yet it did. Despite the fact that the evidence against him was largely circumstantial and he had an airtight alibi, the then-23-year-old Tomasz Komenda was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl. He was released after serving 18 years, when his case was re-opened by a group of qualified lawyers who proved without a shadow of a doubt the gross negligence of numerous people involved in putting Komenda in jail. The film presents the physical and psychological hell the poor man went through before he was finally given back what should not have been taken from him: freedom. The film also emphasises the relationship between the increasingly desperate Komenda and his mother who stood beside him for all those years, giving him strength to live through another day. This story should not have happened in real life, and yet it did. Not one hundred years ago, not fifty, but at the turn of the twenty-first century. Tomasz Komenda became a free man in 2018.

Original title: 25 lat niewinności
Director: Jan Holoubek
Cinematographer: Bartłomiej Kaczmarek

Produced by: TVN Discovery Group
Polish distributor: Kino Świat
Country and year: Poland, 2020

DATING AMBER

In the mid-1990s, small-town Ireland was a place without virtual connections and social media, when you literally had to meet someone face to face to get in their face or start a vicious rumour that would circulate through the school’s bloodstream. Eddie is a terribly shy lad who, despite always appearing sick, dreams of following in his father’s severe military footsteps. On the other hand, Amber is a stereotypical fatherless rebel with a penchant for The Clash’s punk ethos and a plan to leave for London and establish an anarchist bookshop. Oh, right, they are also both gay but not yet ready to come out of the closet. The truth is, some days they are not even prepared to admit it to themselves. And, well, the Christian sex-ed programmes they have to watch at school don’t help – neither do their sex-obsessed peers. That is why, one day, Eddie and Amber begin to pretend they are a heterosexual couple, which might work in theory, but will provoke a series of unexpected complications.

Director: David Freyne
Cinematographer: Ruairí O'Brien

Produced by: ATOMIC 80, Savage Productions
Country and year: Ireland, 2020

HIGH GROUND

In 1919, Arnhem Land, a region of Australia’s Northern Territory, is permanently soaked with the blood of murdered Aboriginal people. One particular massacre provoked by white aggressors sees several peaceful indigenous Australians ruthlessly shot to death. The incident is silenced, while the only survivor, a small boy named Gutjuk, is sent to be educated and assimilated by nearby Christian missionaries. During the subsequent twelve years, white police officers force their vision of stability onto the northern lands. Suddenly, a group of Aboriginal guerrilla fighters begins to introduce the idea of violence to settlers’ lives. Their leader is Gutjuk’s uncle, a desperate man who had lost almost all of his family in the massacre. The British send a small unit led by Travis, an experienced sniper who witnessed the events of 1919, watching helplessly as his colleagues slaughtered the innocent. Travis saved the boy, and now, trying to make amends for the past sins, he makes him his tracker and takes on a mission. Will this be enough?

Director: Stephen Johnson
Cinematographer: Andrew Commis

Produced by: High Ground Pictures

Country and year: Australia, 2020

LAST VERMEER, THE

FILM UNAVAILABLE ONLINE

The end of World War II was the beginning of a long and painful healing process that included justice via finding and putting war criminals on trial. Jewish officer Joseph Piller is one of the cogs of this well-oiled machine, but one day he is put in charge of a case that will change his perspective on many things. Han van Meegeren is a Dutch painter who made a small fortune during the war by selling Johannes Vermeer’s paintings to the Nazis, including Hermann Göring. However, van Meegeren insists that he would never trade the originals and instead sold his own forgeries. Piller’s superiors find it hard to believe because of the many scientific analyses conducted by some of the best specialists available. Besides, admitting that this was a masterful forgery would make van Meegeren a national hero of sorts. Piller is inclined to believe the accused painter, but he must put his whole career at stake to prove it. Is van Meegeren worth that sacrifice?

Director: Dan Friedkin
Cinematographer: Remi Adefarasin

Produced by: Imperative Entertainment, NL Film

Country and year: USA, 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.

Director: Maciek Bochniak
Cinematographer: Paweł Chorzępa
Produced by: Aurum Film
Polish distributor: Kino Świat

Country and year: Poland, 2020

MOSQUITO

An idealistic seventeen-year-old boy enlists in the Portuguese army to serve his country during the trials of the Great War, bring some glory to his family’s name, and, well, see the world a bit. Instead of fighting on bloody European battlefields, Zacarias finds himself on a ship to Mozambique, at the far end of Portugal’s crumbling colonial empire. On his way to Africa, the boy soaks up stories of inhuman black warriors, ridiculous rituals, and ants and snakes as a white person’s greatest nightmare. When he arrives and accidentally loses his unit, Zacarias starts to notice the overwhelming beauty of the ‘Dark Continent’. Thus, he decides to travel across Mozambique and catch up with the army but finds only a series of cruel manifestations of Portugal’s decaying outposts. At the same time, his malaria-infused odyssey makes him question the reality of what he sees. Will Zacarias learn to appreciate the surrounding world, or will he return from Mozambique as yet another colonial oppressor? Assuming he leaves this place at all…

Director: João Nuno Pinto
Cinematographer: Adolpho Veloso

Produced by: Alfama Films
Country and year: Portugal, 2019

SERVANTS

Czechoslovakia, the early 1980s – a car stops under a railway bridge, and two shady men open the trunk and reflect on the corpse lying there. Who was killed? Why were they killed? Who was the killer? A few months earlier, a group of young men start their spiritual journey at a restrictive Catholic seminary. They try to live by the rules that have governed previous generations but are constantly torn between the ideals of the faith they have chosen to represent and the Communist government’s increasingly invasive ideological indoctrination. The youths try to kill time with curiosity and sport. At the same time, their superiors listen in terror to how the Vatican urges through Radio Free Europe not to collaborate with any organisations with decidedly political agendas. When provocative flyers start circulating in the seminary, the government begins an investigation that will change everything and everyone. And so, who shall kill? Who shall be killed? Why kill in the first place? And, will the killer be able to look themselves in the mirror ever again?

Original title: Služobníci

Polish title: Słudzy
Director: Ivan Ostrochovský
Cinematographer: Juraj Chlpík
Produced by: Film And Music Entertainment Ltd, Hai Hui Entertainement, Libra Film Productions, Point Film, Punkchart Films, Rozhlas a televízia Slovenska (RTVS), Sentimentalfilm
Polish distributor: New Horizons Association

Country and year: Slovakia, Romania, Czech Republic, Ireland, 2020

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

It is 1992, and the Siege of Sarajevo is the longest and worst city siege since World War II. Paul Marchand, an experienced war radio reporter and journalist, tries to elicit a reaction from the West to the civilian slaughter happening within the tormented city. Every day, he and his friends pass Sarajevo’s streets filled with crying, shouting, and endless agony. Every day, they see mutilated people who they cannot help. Every day, they risk their lives to tell the world what is happening in the most intense parts of the city. They spend their mornings in morgues, counting the growing number of victims, and in the evenings, they try to wash the blood off their clothes and forget reality under the spell of gambling and alcohol. During the day, when Paul is not speeding through the infamous Sniper Alley or talking with agitated soldiers from both sides of the reasonless conflict, he wonders when this tragedy will end and whether he will make it through as an active reporter or human wreck.

Original title: Sympathie pour le diable
Director: Guillaume De Fontenay
Cinematographer: Pierre Aïm

Produced by: Tim Belda, Frederic Fiore, Gilles Daoust, Nicole Robert, Jean-Yves Roubin, Marc Stanimirovic
Country and year: France, Canada, Belgium, 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
Country and year: France, Luxembourg, Belgium, 2019

VALLEY OF SOULS

It is 2002. The far-right paramilitary organisation The United Self-Defences of Colombia’s reign of terror continues with brutal executions of left-wing insurgents and innocent people who are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Despite these hardships, poor farmers and fishermen try to live normal lives. One night, José, returning to his home after a day of fishing on the Magdalena River, encounters a paramilitary roadblock. He stays in hiding and goes back in the morning, only to realise that his two sons were abducted and probably killed. Left without any other option, José takes his small boat on a journey that will confront him with the transience of life and with different images of his beautiful Colombian homeland dying from the wounds of the people who know no better. José meets many people along the way – some advise him to forget his sons, while others treat him as a madman. The truth is, José no longer knows who he is. He is only certain that he must find his children, or at least their bodies.

Original title: Tantas Almas
Director: Nicolas Rincon Gille
Cinematographer: Juan Sarmiento G

Produced by: Medio De Contencion Producciones
Country and year: Colombia, Belgium, Brazil, France, 2019