A Year in the Life of Franek W. is a 1967 Polish documentary film directed by and based on a screenplay by Kazimierz Karabasz. The film depicts a year in the life of a twenty-year-old boy from a small village, Franciszek Wróbel, who emigrates to large industrial Silesia to join the Voluntary Labor Corps. Karabasz’s method was based on careful and impartial observation of the protagonist’s fate; the only commentary was provided by letters read by Wróbel himself.
Tag: POLAND
A live action viewpoint camera cuts between various mundane settings – children in a nursery, a house, office, workshop, church, hospital, farm, train and so on. The images are increasingly treated with effects, then shift to animation – showing rolling abstract patterns – before reverting back to live action, to be brought up short by a door with a notice pinned to it: “Stop! Entrance Prohibited”.
One day a commuter, who happens to be a burglar, finds a dead body on a train. As he was just returning from a burglary and not wanting to draw attention to himself, he decides to get rid of the corpse himself. Little does he know that the body is about to embark on one hell of a journey…
The last film of Andrzej Munk, who died in a car crash during the filming. A former guard in the women’s section of Auschwitz encounters a passenger on a cruise ship who was one of her prisoners. This sets off a series of flashbacks concerning those terrible days, and the struggle of wills that took place between prisoner and guard.
Tomek and Gucia are a pair of seven-year-olds. On a beautiful, sunny afternoon, they engage in typical children’s games after school – playing hopscotch and hide-and-seek, doing somersaults on the beater and climbing the wall. But above all, they play with each other – the boy tries to turn the girl into a boy named Piotrek. However, behind childhood games there is something much more serious – the first feeling.
In the 1940 Olympics, prisoners of a German stalag organized sports games in the underground. Had it not been for the war, they probably would have met the camp supervisors in the sports arena. Meanwhile, the SS men try to break them with punitive gymnastics.
Krzysztof Kieślowski unmasks the prototype of the informer and opportunist (in a totalitarian society) exclusively from the latter’s own perspective. Even the commentary is by the ambivalent protagonist. Kieślowski later kept the film under lock and key in order not to harm his protagonist.
On December 30, 1931 a 17-year-old daughter of engineer Henryk Zaremba is murdered. Rita Gorgonowa, a housekeeper, nanny of Zaremba\’s children, and his lover is accused of the murder. It was the most sensational murder of those times, followed with interest by the general public in Poland. The film is a reconstruction of the events, in particular of the trial itself. Majewski\’s picture raises the issues related to the functioning of the judiciary system, stressing the fundamental principle of law that in order to sentence an accused person indisputable evidence of guilt is required.