Danuta Szaflarska
1915 - 2017
Pora Umierać
Dorota Kędzierzawska
Danuta Szaflarska, Krzysztof Globisz
An impressionistic, black-and-white portrait of the day-to-day of a nonagenarian woman as she experiences the final act of her life. Danuta Szaflarska stars as Aniela, who lives in a massive yet rapidly-deteriorating wooden house, filled with souvenirs and treasures of eras gone by. Aniela runs into conflict in her dealings with others, particularly a nasty neighbor who sees her property as an eyesore and wants to do everything in his reach to buy it up and tear it down, and her married adult son, who - though kindly - triggers paranoia within Aniela (she cannot help but believe that he is scheming and planning to wheedle the property away from her). Driven aback by these individuals, Aniela finds one of her only sources of comfort and reassurance in her daily talks with her dog, Fila - and develops a great affinity for spying on the neighbors' doings whenever boredom creeps in.
Time to Die
The Yellow Scarf
Janusz Morgenstern
Janusz Gajos, Danuta Szaflarska
The main character - a man who suffers from alcoholism - wants to change his tumultuous life. The day before Christmas Eve he receives a gift from his son - a yellow scarf. A gift is a kind of talisman he receives from loved ones, and every time he loses it. When after another banquet he falls into delirium, his ex-wife and secretary bring him to his mother. She helps him to sober up and arranges holiday celebration for two of them. She gives her son another yellow scarf, in belief that it will help him break the pernicious habit.
The Yellow Scarf
Skarb
Leonard Buczkowski
Jadwiga Chojnacka, Wanda Jakubińska
The first Polish post-war comedy. Witek and Krysia, a married couple, move to Warsaw and have nowhere to stay. They rent a room in a house with many other lodgers. Witek dreams of their own house and draws a sketch of their future home, marking the place where his wife will sleep with the word "treasure". The other lodgers find the draft and a frantic search for the treasure begins.
Treasure
Dom bez okien
Stanisław Jędryka
Wiesław Gołas, Danuta Szaflarska
All the ambiance of an old-fashioned circus comes across with great clarity in this otherwise routine psychological tale about a mean-spirited mime and his effects on his colleagues. The small, traveling circus has been sliding downhill for awhile, and unless some new life is infused into its acts, its future does not look very rosy. Into this precarious situation comes a new mime with the uncanny ability to sap the confidence of his fellow performers. If he continues for long in this vein, no one will be able to believe they have any talent left at all.
The Impossible Goodbye
The People from the Train
Kazimierz Kutz
Janina Traczykówna, Andrzej May
A group of people find themselves stuck in remote train station in German-occupied Poland. A drunk German station guard there gets paranoid and sees partisans all around him, phones headquarters, and when the German soldiers arrive and search the station they find a gun. They then threaten to execute every fifth person unless someone claims it.
The People from the Train
Tydzień z życia mężczyzny
Jerzy Stuhr
Jerzy Stuhr, Gosia Dobrowolska
Jerzy Stuhr wrote, directed, and starred in this drama about a man sworn to uphold the law who applies a very different moral code to himself than he does to others. As Adam Borowski, Stuhr plays a government lawyer prosecuting a variety of cases, including smuggling, theft, child abandonment, and racially motivated assault. However, Adam's own life is hardly a model by which to live. He's overextended himself financially and is trying to figure out how to avoid paying the hospital bills for his terminally ill mother. Adam is married, but he's been having an affair for some time, and, while he breaks off his relationship with his mistress, he's easily tempted into other liaisons. His wife wants to adopt a handicapped child; Adam would prefer not to have another child in the house, and he uses his influence to slow up the paperwork. And in order to reduce his tax bill, Adam has involved himself in a charitable donation scheme of dubious legality.
A Week in the Life of a Man
