Walser
There is a lost tribe living on the edge of civilization. The Conteheli have blue eyes and fantastically woven flaxen dreads, and they paint their faces in tribal patterns. They look like the fulfillment of a hippie fantasy about a return to nature or a Slavic version of the characters from Avatar. When they play their ethno-futuristic instruments, they merge with the cosmos and with all their fundamental visions of the oneness of humans and nature. Beautiful, young, and immortal, they run wild in the nude, adorned only with jewelry made of straw and fruit. This paradise is, however, invaded by civilization in the person of a railway official named Walser. Although he attempts to enter their world at any cost and to learn their unintelligible language, he brings about only chaos and destruction. The stylized world of Walser flirts with the traditions of genre cinema: post-apocalyptic science fiction, Westerns, and films about cave-dwellers, where primitivism and glamour are not contradictions. Familiar clichés from genre films serve as building blocks for the director to construct a multilevel puzzle out of literary figures from lost paradises, philosophical and counter-cultural concepts of utopian societies, and fantasies about the end of civilization.
Zbigniew Libera
He is one of Poland's most important artists. In the 1980s, he was part of the alternative scene in Łódź that opposed the Communist region but also maintained a certain distance from the main anticommunist opposition. In the 1990s, he came out from underground in order to suggest a radical redefinition of the language of art. His shocking videos from the 1980s (Obrzędy intymne / Intimate Rites and Perseweracja mistyczna / Mystic Perseverance) were about 10 years ahead of the body-art wave. In the mid-1990s, Libera made so-called corrective devices, objects that were made out of existing mass-produced consumer items (Universal Penis Expander, Body Master: A set of toys for children up to 9 years of age). In recent years, he has mainly been interested in photography and how the media shape our visual memory and manipulate our image of history (Pozytywy / Positives, Mistrzowie / Masters). Walser is his feature-length film debut.
Filmography
2015 Walser