Polonia Global Fund

A festival entitled Dialogue of Four Cultures is currently taking place in the Polish city of Łódź. The four cultures in question are Polish, Russian, Jewish and German. According to Polish public television, the festival’s purpose is to bring together all the unique features of different forms of art and cultural traditions, and to remind people that Łódź evolved in a mix of Polish, Jewish, German and Russian cultures.

Matsei Domanski, the artistic director of the festival, explained that the programme includes 70 performances of operas, ballets and plays, a film festival, exhibitions, and concerts. Among the highlights of the programme are the A Master’s Trophies. The Awards of Andzhei Vaida exhibition, a jazz concert by the Polish Jarek Smetana Trio, a Polish performance of The Fiddler on the Roof, The Russian Hamlet by the Russian Boris Eifman Ballet, and a performance of Claustrophobia by St. Petersburg’s Maly Drama Theatre.

The festival ends on October 6.

While making ”In Desert and Wilderness,” director Gavin Hood faced almost as many pitfalls as the movie’s put-upon protagonists. In the 2001 film, set in the 19th century, a teen-age Polish boy and a young English girl escape fanatic Arabic kidnappers and begin a dangerous trek across the Sudan, battling malaria, thirst and wild animals along the way.

First off, Hood was ignoring one of show business’ oldest adages — never work with kids or animals — by taking over filming of the novel by ”Quo Vadis” author Henryk Sienkiewicz from the original director, who had fallen ill a few days into the shoot.

Then, when the 39-year-old arrived from London, he had to surmount another barrier — language. ”In Desert and Wilderness” being a Polish production, the actors in the lead roles of Stas and Nel were Poles. Fortunately for the South African-born Hood, they spoke English as well as Polish. However the young South Africans playing Kali and Mea, who help Stas and Nel find their way home, did not speak a word of Polish and had to learn the language phonetically. Also, several other actors were Arabic and spoke neither English or Polish.

The Hollywood solution, says Hood over the phone from his Los Angeles home, would have been: ”Throw money at problem and it will go away.”

But working with only a $4.5 million budget — paltry by Hollywood standards but a princely sum for a Polish film — Hood learned to improvise. ”You hire a local crew,” he says. ”The common language is English.”

An even bigger problem, says Hood, was deciding how to present the sprawling story by Nobel Prize winner Sienkiewicz, which had been filmed once before in 1973. That version, says Hood, was ”more adult” and between three and four hours long. He had been hired to make a two-hour film with a PG rating in 10 weeks.

”The book is sharply divided into two halves,” Hood explains. ”The first is fairly brutal and realistic as it tells of the kidnapping and the children’s treatment at the hand of their captors. At one point Stas is kicked in the face by one of his captors. The second half is much more whimsical, almost a fantasy, with the children hooking up with an elephant and the little girl swinging from the trunk. I grew up in Africa and believe me, swinging from a trunk of an elephant does not happen.”

The solution to balancing fantasy and reality, Hood says, was seeing the story though the eyes of a child, specifically the young girl, Nel. ”Nel is wise beyond her years and that makes her believable rather than silly, even when she’s talking to an elephant,” says Hood.

Once that idea clicked, says Hood, other problems seemed less formidable. Still, while trying to preserve the book’s adventurous, coming-of-age spirit, Hood had to jettison some of parts of it. ”Many of the concepts frankly are dated,” Hood says. ”For example, in the book, the young Polish kid converts Kali to Catholicism, and he goes back and converts his village.”

Hood points out that while his producers insisted the religious aspect of the book be in the film, ”I tried to bring in a slightly different religious belief. … The children learn from each other. Stas prays to God to spare Nel when she falls ill. Kali prays to his ancestors.”

Working with elephants, lions, horses, donkeys, cheetahs, camels and fish didn’t faze Hood. ”I grew up around that,” he says. ”My dad was a nature photographer. I had some familiarity with the environment and was comfortable with the location. … I pretty much had lived this story.”

Nevertheless the animals posed some interesting challenges. In one scene a lion was supposed to circle a tree where the children have taken refuge during a thunderstorm. ”The rain machines only cover a limited area,” says Hood, ”and lions aren’t stupid. They can see where it’s raining and where it’s not. So we had to put dead chickens behind branches to try and encourage the lion to come under the tree.”

In another scene, an elephant had to be coaxed to extend its trunk to sniff Nel. ”We had to put fruit underneath her wardrobe,” says Hood.

And the first time Hood filmed the scene of Kali talking to a fish he pulls from the water, ”the fish was so stunned, it looked like all we got was a dead fish. We didn’t know water was rushing through his gills too fast.”

For his effort, ”In Desert and Wilderness” has become the third-highest grossing film in Polish history and last year won several awards at European film festivals. In America, after the Roxy date, ”In Desert and Wilderness” will be screened at the Chicago Children’s Film Festival.

Hood has worked as a stage and TV actor and scriptwriter in South Africa and Britain and landed small roles in 1994’s ”Kickboxer 5,” 1991’s ”American Kickboxer” and 1990’s ”Curse 3: Blood Sacrifice,” which were filmed overseas by American companies.

But he has made his biggest impact as screenwriter, producer and director of 1999’s ”A Reasonable Man,” in which he co-starred with fellow South Africa native Nigel Hawthorne (”The Madness of King George”).

”It was about a ‘hood boy charged with the murder of a baby whom he believed was an evil spirit,” says Hood, ”It posed some interesting ethical questions.”

After the film was screened at the Sundance Film Festival, Hood, an ardent admirer of Sidney Lumet, Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Stanley Kubrick, was named to a 10 Directors to Watch list and subsequently got his green card. ”I knew I had to live in America,” he says. ”After all, this is the home of film.”

By Len Righi, of The Morning Call

Renowned director pleased to bring Oscar-worthy, metro-shot film to festival

Halifax’s hopes for an Academy Award were dashed when The Shipping News failed to make a critical impact this year, but we’ve got another good shot with acclaimed director Agnieszka Holland’s new film, Julie Walking Home.

Australian actress Miranda Otto gives a truly Oscar-worthy performance as Julie, a Canadian woman whose comfortable family existence suddenly shatters when she catches her husband in bed with another woman. Poised for stardom, Otto is a princess in the upcoming Lord of the Rings films, and was also in The Thin Red Line and Human Nature.

Hollywood’s William Fichtner (Armageddon, A Perfect Storm) puts in a raw, intense effort as the unfaithful hubby. While he desperately tries to salvage the marriage, the couple learns their son Nicholas has inoperable cancer, which further tests Julie’s dwindling faith and belief system. Against the wishes of her husband, she travels to Poland to bring the sickly boy to a spiritual healer (Montreal’s Lothaire Bluteau), who also has a special cure for her aching heart.

The film got a warm response at recent festivals in Venice and Toronto, but Holland is delighted to bring it back to Halifax tonight, to reconnect with the city where she shot it last November. It’s a co-production by Polish, German and Canadian companies, and Chris Zimmer of imX communications was the local producer.

“I wrote (the script) for Canada, so I was looking for the place which will give the right feeling for the story, and actually, Halifax was the most interesting place for me. Visually I really liked the place very much,” says Holland, who earned an Oscar nomination for best foreign film for Angry Harvest. Her last big films were Washington Square and The Secret Garden, and she’s now co-directing an 18th-century epic in Slovakia with her daughter.

“I’m really happy that I can come here because it was such a great crew, you know, I really appreciate them so much. One of the best crews I was working with recently,” she says.

Holland also raves about our city’s talent, and chose to cast Halifax actors in some key supporting roles, which happens rarely with the big shoots. Mary Colin Chisholm appears as the doctor who treats the couple’s son, Port Hawkesbury’s Mark Day is a priest who baptizes the boy, and Made In Canada’s Jackie Torrens has some really memorable scenes as Julie’s best friend.

‘Sweetly iron maternal hand’

“I’ve done four similar bar scenes where I’m the best friend of a gal who gets loaded and needs to make sense of some stuff,” quips Torrens, also Molly Parker’s bar pal in Marion Bridge. “I feel I’ve mastered that role now.”

She has one incredibly harrowing scene — when Julie insists on selling the family home (on Oakland Road), Torrens’s real estate-agent character brings some prospective buyers to the house, just in time to see Fichtner erupt in a rage and start throwing furniture around. As with many of Holland’s films (Olivier, Olivier and Europa Europa), this one thrives on the drama and harsh reality of people coping at the absolute worst time of their lives.

Torrens wanted to work with Holland “because I was intrigued to see how a woman with an incredible career behind her would command the set,” adding “she did so with a sweetly iron maternal hand.”

Some of Holland’s crew was from Poland, and worked very quickly together and had their own technical language on the no-nonsense set. The locals held their own, and there’s a real confidence in local acting and technical expertise “that I think we’ve just newly acquired in the past few years. It’s heartwarming to see,” says Torrens, also pleased this year to see local films “moving away from simply telling the Maritime story.”

Holland’s movie was inspired by the true story of a friend caught in a conflict of faith and science. As with most of her films, she coaxes incredible performances from her child actors, in this case Toronto’s Bianca Crudo and Oshawa’s Ryan Smith.

“I think you have to treat them like grown-ups, you know? Without patronizing … trust them, and they will trust you,” she says.

She also had quite a time with 800 extras during the faith-healing scenes in Poland — “they really believed that this guy could heal them. So Lothaire was extremely successful in Poland. Everybody wanted to be touched by him!”

Copyright 2002 The Daily News

Olga Torkarczuk claims her place among the greats of Polish letters with House of Day, House of Night

House of Day, House of Night (Writings from an Unbound Europe)

What other nation can boast two living Nobel laureates – Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz – and, in the late Zbigniew Herbert, a poet at least their equal? Add to these Ryszard Kapuscinski, Slawomir Mrozek and Pawel Huelle and the debt we owe to Polish letters becomes clear. It’s a distinctive list that draws on a powerful collective faith and an irony that often seems the only sane approach to the cruel joke of Polish history.

With House of Day, House of Night, her first full-length work here, Olga Tokarczuk can rightfully take her place among these writers. It is not so much a novel as a collection of linked short narratives, found stories, hagiography and incidental observations and is a delight to read – wonderfully inventive and by turns comic, tragic and wise.

The narrator arrives to live with her husband, R, in a small village in the west of Poland. In no particular order she pieces together the stories of the local community and the wider history that informs them.

This being Poland, the village’s history is by no means straightforward. It is just yards from the Czech border. Villagers can hear Czech discos; are watched by Czech border guards; the short cut into town takes them through Czech territory. But the people are not indigenous. They are Poles who, after the war, left the old Polish lands of the east – the newly Sovietised territories of Belorussia and Lithuania – and took up residence in the west, occupying houses that had just been vacated by Germans fleeing to the new borders of post-Nazi Germany.

These absent Germans make up one of the many recurring motifs of the book. Their hastily buried chattels are frequently dug up in the forest or the fields; as frail visitors they keep turning up to see their native land again before they die (in one case, as they die).
Tokarczuk’s most successful sections are the quick, invariably unhappy portraits that help make up the local mythology. Marek Marek was a drunk who discovered he had shared his body with a terrified bird; after a few botched attempts, he hangs himself. Franz Frost had nightmares transmitted to him from a newly-discovered planet; to protect himself he carved a hat from ash wood; come the war, he refused to swap the hat for a helmet and was killed. His son died from eating a poisoned mushroom and the story of the Frosts ends, as do several others, with a recipe for preparing supposedly toxic amanitas.

If this sounds fanciful, it is not. Tokarczuk’s prose is simple and unadorned. She tells her stories with a natural fluency that easily accommodates the hopes, drudgery and absurdities of the world she is describing. Real lives mingle with the imagined, dreams with day, past with present in an entirely plausible way. A lot of nasty things happen and many people die but the tone is by no means gloomy in tone. As Marta, the voice of folk wisdom in the book, points out: ‘If death were nothing but bad, people would stop dying immediately.’ House of Day, House of Night opens its doors on a very fresh and vibrant Polish talent.

By Philip Marsden, The Observer

Lewis Nkosi, who comes across as a mild, urbane and gently humorous world citizen, says he is astonished at how at home he feels in Durban, and attributes this to the notion of “home as language”. After 42 years of living abroad he is sometimes mistaken for an American in his home town, where he greatly enjoys the Zulu he hears around him: he is able to eavesdrop on disparaging remarks made by a rickshaw man, understand a colloquial term for hobos used on the radio, and ponder the ironies of a song he heard somewhere: “I will never return to Zululand/ because that’s where my father died.”

He left South Africa in 1960 on a one-way exit permit when he was 23 and en route to take up a Niemann Fellowship at Harvard after a spell as a very junior writer on Drum magazine in Johannesburg. In the years of his enforced absence he established himself as an academic and critic in the field of African and other post-colonial literature, working in places as diverse as the United States, the United Kingdom, Zambia and Poland.

Cornelius Molapo, the protagonist of Nkosi’s new novel, Underground People (Kwela), is a poet and teacher in Soweto and a member of the “National Liberation Movement”. Lewis says this character was partly inspired by Can Themba, whose eloquence and passion he remembers from his Drum days. The plot revolves around the sudden disappearance of Molapo, taking the reader into the world of underground resistance politics, international human rights and to the rural area of Tabanyane where the comrades are trying to oust the “Chief” newly imposed by the apartheid government — a familiar scenario.

Although the action of the novel takes place in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it seems to encompass the 1950s and 1960s in a sort of pastiche of attitudes and political issues that were current then, and still informing people’s decisions well into the 1990s. Pivotal to all this is Molapo’s relationship with his beautiful, estranged wife, Maureen.

Nkosi admits to having been “exercised” by certain questions that are the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of this novel, most notably the determinism inherent in the Marxist and Hegelian view of history, the role of the heroic individual as well as the effects of accidental contingencies on well-planned operations. The latter he illustrates by means of the discovery of the comrades’ mountain hideout by a pair of lovers who are only looking for somewhere to make love.

Although many South Africans attribute the gradual weaning of South African writing from its obsession with politics to people such as Albie Sachs and Njabulo Ndebele, Nkosi points out, and this has been acknowledged by these two, that “if one looks at the history of literary criticism in relation to the literature of protest, I am the first critic to have disputed the pre-eminence of the literature of protest as such”. So there is some irony in the fact that Underground People is both a celebration and critique of a life lived in “the struggle”.

Molapo, as early on as page nine, is speaking about “those nodal points where love and revolution intersect”. In an argument between him and Bulane, his movement bureaucrat superior, in which Bulane is manipulating Molapo into accepting the mission he’s been assigned, Molapo says: “How can we be free without love?” and Bulane counters with: “How can we love without freedom?” Nkosi enjoys the fact that as a novelist he can say that they are both right.

In a review of a recent biography of Chinua Achebe, Lewis comments that Achebe considers his role is to “defend African culture” (against Western cultural imperialism). There is no sense of this in Underground People; he has written about many strands of South African culture as if existing within them, and not from the outside. He is even sympathetic to the Afrikaner policeman, Adam de Kock, who is being intimidated by his English bank manager. And his most “disgusting” character, an incorrigibly racist farmer, amuses Nkosi so much that he admits to becoming quite fond of him.

Written in a swift and engaging style, this multi-layered novel moves from wonderfully observed characters and situations to theoretical discussions. Although the latter are embedded in the story they do contrast with the otherwise smooth action of the plot. But they are an essential element of Nkosi’s intention, requiring the reader to examine the idea that “men of action are able to live in suspension as if love and that type of emotion exist only for the purposes of feeding into their work … to me an astonishing way of conducting your life”.