An allegorical story about a prisoner and a guard, and about the difficulty to grasp the border between freedom and captivity. The film shows the relativity of the relationship between the executioner and the victim. They both need some contact, they need something to do, they need thoughts. The film won the Crystal Award, the Grand Prix of the 7th International Animated Film Festival in Annecy, the Honorary Diploma at the 20th International Film Festival in Locarno, and the Third Prize at the 7th Cracow Film Festival (1967).
Tag: POLAND
The first feature by Andrzej Żuławski immediately established his emotionally charged, fast-and-furious style. Drawing from the biography of his father, particularly his experiences in Nazi German-occupied Poland, the film follows a fugitive whose reality implodes when he witnesses the murders of his family, propelling him into a nightmarish world filled with doppelgängers, fluid identities, pervasive dread, and an enigmatic Nazi vaccine laboratory. In all its fantastic and macabre glory, The Third Part of the Night is a delirious portrayal of the chaos wrought upon the psyche by the horrors of war, and one of the most remarkable directorial debuts of all time.
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In the winter of 1943 two young Jews, Alek and Fryda, escape, via sewer tunnels, from the atrocities underway in Warsaw ghetto. Alek, entrusted with undeveloped photos of the horrors within, makes his way to a supposedly safe apartment only to find it occupied by Germans. Another tenant, a pole Stephania, abruptly offers to shelter him in her spacious apartment. She comforts him and they make love that very night. Stefania is uncommonly generous and willing to jeopardize her own safety by hiding a Jew. She even goes to a nearby church and rescues Fryda. But Fryda is ungrateful and proceeds to sabotage the trio’s safety in insidious ways.
Ten days of preparation for the Monte Carlo rally. The two Polish drivers battle with the technical shortcomings of the Polish Fiat 125 and overwhelming bureaucracy. They did not finish the race. An allegory of the country’s industrial and economic problems.
14-year-old Jurek spends his summer holidays in his Silesian hometown of Borzechów. The boy gets into a conflict with a group of peers bullying their weaker colleagues. He is also shaken by the mysterious disappearance of his mother, who has allegedly gone away to a sanatorium. Unexpectedly, he falls in love with Elżbieta, a girl from Warsaw. The new experiences accelerate his coming of age and turn him into a responsible, courageous man. The end of summer holidays becomes a symbolic end of his childhood.
The film is a humorous lecture on the internal structure of a dachshund. Parodying popular lectures at the same time, it contains a message about the superiority of the products of living organisms’ techniques and calls for respect for the environment.
Evening. Two contemporary teenage girls, Blanca and Pauline, living in an old manor house, are watching a television programme about the sexual life of people and of animals. Surprised by Bianca’s father who returns late at night they quickly change channels. The film they then see is composed of old archive material and forms the start of their journey into the past.
The reunion of a group of former medical students results in a flood of bitter memories… An allegorical fiction between Cocteau and Brecht, making the portrait of a tormented society seeking for freedom. Censored by the Polish authorities, the film was reedited and new footage added by Skolimowski in 1981, merging an introduction in color shot at the time and the 1967 feature in his original B&W with a new director’s cut.