ANDREJ WAJDA AWARD

On the eve of the Berlinale, 3-5 February, Gary McVey of the American Cinema Foundation presented at Arsenal-Kino (home of the International Forum of Young Cinema) the »Freedom Film Festival Berlin 2004.« Programmed were Marcel Lozinski’s 89 mm from Europe (Poland, 1993) and Recipe for Life (Poland, 1977), together with Jan Kraus’s Small Town (Czech Republic, 2003), Lidya Bobova’s Granny (Russia, 2003), and Sergei Bodrov Jr’s Sisters (Russia, 2001). The Andrzej Wajda / Philip Morris Freedom Prize will be awarded to Marcel Lozinski on February 8, at 18:00 in the Rotes Rathaus.

Marcel Lozinski is best known internationally for his documentary 89 mm from Europe (1993). Nominated for an Academy Award, awarded at several festivals, and critically praised as one of the finest statements made on the prevailing atmosphere of the Cold War in post-perestroika Europe, this 12-minute documentary sketches a moment of transition between two different worlds: Europe and the Soviet Union. The scene is the railway station at Brest-Litovsk. Before a train can move on from Poland to Byelorussia, the wheels of each of the carriages have to be adjusted to meet the conditions of a wider gauge ­ a difference of only »89 mm« ­ yet symbolic for the huge transformation from one mind-set to another. Meanwhile, while the changes are being made, train passengers from France and Germany, Holland and Poland, watch the ceremony mutely ­ as much in dismay as in disbelief.

Born 1940 in France, Marcel Lozinski was educated in Poland as both an electronics engineer and film cameraman. Forming an alliance in Lodz with fellow filmmakers Krzysztof Kieslowski, Agnieszka Holland, Wojciech Wisniewski, and Tomasz Zygadlo, they forged in 1970 a school of documentary filmmaking that is often referred to as the »cinema of moral concern.« In order to bypass the watchful eyes of the censors, they fashioned documentary statements around symbols, metaphors, and common modes of expression that could easily be encoded by an intelligent viewer. Their films were designed to provoke discussion and exchange ideas in a repressive socialist society. The cohesion of the group ­ none of whom could be cited as an »angry filmmaker« ­ was instrumental in the forming of the Solidarnosc movement and had a major impact on the Polish cultural scene throughout the 1970s and up to the declaration of martial law und General Jaruzelski in 1981.

Recipe for Life, set in a summer camp for young married couples and their families, is exemplary of how Marcel Lozinski could »shoot between the lines« to expose the seemy side of a corroded socialist ideal. The participants, most of whom just want to enjoy a summer vacation, are pulled around by the noses by a sychophant camp director and spying »voting committee« to judge a contest throughout the week and award the »best cabin« with a new washing-machine ­ one that never materializes in the end and has to be substituted for a tape-recorder instead! Generally recognized as the last active participant of the &rquo;cinema of moral concern« documentary school, Marcel Lozinski continued after the triumph of the Solidarity Movement to make documentaries concerned with questions of ethics and responsibility. In 1993, he was honored with a retrospective homage at the Leipzig DOKfestival. Among his best known documentaries are the award-winning Microphone Test (1980), a portrait of Solidarnosc activity in the radio station of a cosmetic company; Birthplace (1992), a document about people suppressing the past in a village that once included Jews; and Anything Can Happen (1995), a disarming journey through Polish life-and-times today by way of a 6-year-old boy (the director’s son) asking older people simple questions without receiving compete answers.

Ron Holloway