Events
Zbigniew Libera
castKrzysztof Stroiński, Gustaw Klyszcz, Joanna Wiktorczyk, Andrzej Borowski
sci-fi / Poland 2016 / 78’
A lost tribe lives on the fringes of civilisation. The Contehli people have blue eyes, fair dreadlocks and painted faces. They look like the embodiment of hippie fantasies about going back to nature or a Slavic version of Avatar. When playing ethno-futurist instruments, they unite with the cosmos and all rootical visions of the unification of humanity with nature. Young, beautiful and immortal, they run naked, arrayed in jewellery of straw and fruit. Yet, this heavenly world is trampled upon by civilisation in the form of a railway administration clerk, Walser. Although he tries to penetrate their idyllic world and learn their incomprehensible language, he brings nothing else but chaos. The styled world of Walser flirts with the tradition of genre cinema: post-apocalyptic sci-fi, western or cavemen films. Here, primitivism and “glamour” do not clash with each other. The clichés known from genre cinema become blocks for Libera, who uses them to build a multi-layered riddle of literary figures of the paradise lost, philosophical and counterculture concepts of a utopian community or phantasms about the end of civilisation.