27/09/2006

Polish film lovers have been taken by surprise by an expert committee’s (some members of which sat on the Gdynia festival jury) choice of Retrieval [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Sławomir Fabicki as Polish candidate in the 2007 Oscar nominations shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film.

The decision may come as a shock, as Fabicki’s debut feature did not entirely win over juries at the Gdynia Film Festival, where it won only two prizes, Best Photography (Bogumił Godfrejow) and Best Editing (Jarosław Kamiński).

However, Fabicki is known in Europe and in the US. Retrieval – screened in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes earlier this year (see news) – was honoured with an Ecumenical Jury Prize and Fabicki’s previous film, A Man Thing, for which the director won several international awards, was nominated for an Oscar for Best Short in 2002.

Retrieval is the emotional tale of a 19 year-old man (Antoni Pawlicki) ready to sacrifice everything to get papers for the woman he loves (Nataliya Vdovina of Andrei Zviaguintsev’s The Return), a Ukrainian emigrant mother a few years his senior. His efforts lead him to petty crime and blackmail through the world of fighting and secret boxing matches. Wojtek does make an earnest escape from this vicious circle but ends up paying a high price.

"I think it’s a universal story, in which I wanted to show a young man who faces a rather difficult ethical dilemma and who can’t choose. That happens to most of us, to do wrong and make mistakes when we are young,” Fabicki told Cineuropa after the film’s screening at Gdynia.

Retrieval already has a French distributor, while in Poland the film will be released through Kino Świat.

Its producer Opus Film is also the co-producer of Luxembourg’s shortlisted Oscars candidate, Your Name is Justine by Franco de Pena.

(Translated from French)