The Forest
Film Information:
Year:
2009
The Forest
País:
Director:
Color:
B&W
Format:
35 mm
Duration:
75 min
Cast:
- Mariusz Bonaszewski, Stanislaw Brudny
Production:
- GUIÓN: Piotr Dumala
- FOTOGRAFÍA: Adam Sikora
- MONTAJE: Katarzyna Maciejko-Kowalczyk
- PRODUCCIÓN: Krzysztof Kopczynski, Bozena Krakówka
Contact:
- Polish Film Institute
- ul. Krakowskie Przedmiescie 21/23
- 00-071 Warsaw, Poland
- T +48 22 421 0130
- F +48 22 421 0241
- E malgorzata.janczak@pisf.pl
- pisf@pisf.pl
- W www.pisf.pl
Synopsis
The Forest is the surprising first feature by Polish animator Piotr Dumala (whose short films were screened at Bafici in 2007 in a retrospective). The Forest is not an animated film, except for its very first minutes –which are impressive for their nightmare-like atmosphere–, and it has only two characters: father and son. Once the brief animation is over, the story oscillates between the inside of a house and the outside –a magnificent forest– on different timelines. The forest is where strange and almost unreal events take place, and where the father is fierce, severe, the leader of the two. Inside the house, the son devoutly takes care of his gravely ill father. With a great visual force, always in black and white and with a strong stylization of images and lights –and even some echoes of Alexander Sokurov–, Dumala manages to express an undeniable ache, while also sketching a limited –but in no way less intense– map of filial abnegation.