Extras top the bill
With today’s release of the second major winner at the recent Gdynia Polish Film Festival, Extras by Michał Kwieciński, Polish audiences finally have the opportunity to see a good local comedy on the big screen – a genre that has been neglected for quite some time by Polish directors.
Kwieciński is above all a producer (Akson Studio), well-known on the Polish film market. One of his most recent productions is Ode to Joy, a highly critically acclaimed film starring Anna Kazejak, Leszek Dawid and Jan Komasa. Kwieciński is currently producing Wajda's Post Mortem.
With Extras, the producer successfully takes on the role of director for the first time. The film picked up several awards at the Gdynia Film Festival, winning Best Script Award (Jarosław Sokół); Best Photography (Arkadiusz Tomiak), Best Supporting Actress (Anna Romantowska) and Best Supporting Actor (Krzysztof Kiersznowski), as well as the Audience Award.
Kwieciński's story is set in a small village, where a Chinese film crew are convinced that "the Poles are the saddest nation of the world”. The director used ordinary people as extras to shoot his drama, including an accountant, a photographer, a salesperson and a porter. The rather eventless daily lives of these characters are filled with harmony and stability.
And yet, from behind this monotonous routine individual dramas discreetly emerge, supposedly hidden behind the cloak of the past but whose traces are visible in each character. It is this duplicity of destinies that gives the brilliant comedy a hint of bitterness: Extras would has remained only a banal comedy if Kwieciński did not have a deep sense of psychology that allowed him to construct his characters with rare and sincere precision.
The film, produced by Kamil Przełęcki for Akson Studio, is on release in Poland through ITI Cinema.
(Translated from French)
Did you enjoy reading this article? Please subscribe to our newsletter to receive more stories like this directly in your inbox.
