ONE DAY IN PEOPLE'S POLAND
(Jeden dzien z zycia w PRL)



2005, 59 min.

Direction: Maciej Drygas
Script: Maciej Drygas
Music: Pawel Szymanski
Editing: Katarzyna Maciejko-Kowalczyk
Sound: Iwo Klimek
Producers: Maciej Drygas, Jacques Debs
Produced by: TVP Channel 1, Arte, ADR Production

SYNOPSIS:

September 27, 1962. An ordinary day in Poland. 1600 babies are born, 600 people die and the weather is neither good nor bad. And yet, something noticeable happens everywhere in the country. The police arrest a suspect, the neighbor buys some salt and a man is openly reprimanded for wearing a beret. With a complex collage of footage from Polish archives and sound bites of radio and police services, director presents a nuanced image of everyday life in communist Poland in 1962. Now and then, sound and image seem to fit perfectly, and sometimes a striking combination of the two produces a new reality. A police officer reports his experiences of the day, after which a mother reads a letter addressed to her son who is in prison. The fragments, succeeding each other in a seemingly arbitrary order, lend the film a rhythm that ripples on, falters and fluctuates again. Just like life itself.

Maciej Drygas (b. 1956 in Lodz) graduated from the Directing Department at the Soviet Union National Film School (VGiK) in 1981. He worked as the Assistant Director for Krzysztof Zanussi and Krzysztof Kieslowski (directing collaboration in Blind Chance, 1981). Since 1991 he has directed documentary films and radio program; received numerous prestigious awards, including "Felix" of the European Film Academy for the best documentary in 1991 for his "Hear My Cry" and the 2005 Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights. At the present, he is the head of the Radio Documentary Department in Laboratory of Reportage at Warsaw University and a lecturer at the Academy of Visual Arts and New Media.

Tuesday, November 7, 2006 at 8:45 pm. (Gallery Theatre)

Screening with STATE OF WEIGHTLESSNESS directed
by Maciej Drygas