by Lech Majewski
23.04.2015, 6pm
admission free

After „Garden of Earthly Delights” (2003) and „Mill and cross” (2011) – film journeys through the images by Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Bruegel Lech Majewski, poet, painter, composer, writer, producer, and, first of all, director, closes his triptych, this dialogue with the great masters of the past, with „ONIRICA Psie Pole”. The movie is inspired by Dante Alighieri’s „Divine Comedy”. Adam „midway upon the journey of our life, found himself within a forest dark.” He miraculously survived a car crash, in which his beloved Basia and his best friend Kamil died. He also witnessed a collective drama. The year 2010 turned out to be a „biblical year” for the Polish society, pandemonium broke out: floods, fires, landslides and the catastrophe of the Presidential plane. The national tragedy reinforces the experience of the personal one even more. Adam, expert in symbolic literature, decides to give up his academic career and starts working as a checkout assistant at a supermarket. His aunt Xenia tries to help him. An intellectual, admirer of literature, his last relative. She tries to convince him to accept his fate. Explaining, she refers to the metaphor of a glade. The pain isn’t soothed by faith, either. At the confession, Adam admits that trauma bereaved him of ability to pray, since God did not protect the people closest to him. He escapes from the overwhelming reality, falling asleep as often as possible. His imagination, fed by memories, observations, conversation and, first of all, his reading of „Divine Comedy”, brings about incredible visions: father ploughing the floor of the supermarket with oxen; a bikini girl tempting the main character on the snowy slope of the Matterhorn; the Niagara flowing down on the cathedral altar and a forest full of dead people. Only in this parallel is he able to talk again to Kamil or meet Basia. Not only meet, but also be granted ascension, just as it happened for Dante and Beatrice.

Lech Majewski – poet, painter, prose writer, director. Member of the Directors Guild of America and European Film Academy. Born in Katowice, since 1981 has been working mainly abroad. Studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts. Graduate of the Direction Department at the National Film School in Lodz. His films were shown at film festivals, among others in Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto, Rome, New York, Rio de Janeiro, winning numerous awards. His video-arts were presented by many museums and galleries around the world. In 2006, the Museum of Modern Art in New York celebrated his work with an individual retrospective. In 2007, the video-art cycle „Blood of a Poet” became a part of the Venice Biennale. His „The Mill and the Cross” movie premiered at the Louvre. The video-art cycle „Bruegel Suite” was exhibited, among others, at the 54th Biennale in Venice, as well as in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, National Gallery in London, Prado in Madrid.
More information can be found here:
www.onirica.pl
www.lechmajewski.art.pl