May 30, 2010, at 19.00
Koniec Rosji (The end of Russia) directed by Michał Marczak, 72 min.
The director, Michał Marczak, will attend the presentation
a discussion will be held after the presentation
A 19 year old recruit, Alexey, flies in to a remote little outpost on the northern frontier of Russia to serve in the army. It’s one of the few frontier posts guarding the enormous, uninhabited stretches of the Russian state, by the Arctic Ocean. There are six soldiers in the outpost.
Each of them is stuck in the same place for a long time, maybe far too long. It turns out that some of them have their own sad mysteries. It’s difficult for them to get back to the real world and their own pasts. It’s much easier to do an absurd military service of guarding the northern frontier buried in snow, hundreds of kilometers away from the nearest human settlement. The older soldiers will teach Alexey not only how to survive in the polar condition possibly, he’ll learn the most important lesson of his life.
The movie was awarded at this year’s Planet Doc Review one of the most important European reviews of documentaries from all over the world. An international Jury composed of: Paweł Łoziński chairman, Jeanette Groenendaal and Raúl de la Fuente, awarded the Magic Hour Prize and 4,000 euros for “crossing the invisible frontiers in movies, creative presentation of reality and warm look at the people lost in the wilderness of a freezing landscape at the end of the world.”
Michał Marczak, born in 1982, already as a 13-years-old was able to sneak into the movie sets to watch movie crews work; he played in commercials as a model, to learn how to work on the set. His passion resulted in a first video clip recorded when he was 18 and the award at the Yach Film festival in 2000 for a director’s debut. He also made videos for the following artists: Maanam, Kasia Kowalska, Budka Suflera, Blue Café, Voo Voo, Anna Maria Jopek and Michał Bajor (promoting “Quo Vadis”). For some time he studied at the Vancouver Film School and the California Institute of The Arts in Los Angeles; he left both of them and came back to Poland, when he started studying and directing movies. He’s a graduate of the Documentary Course at the Andrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing. Among others, he made “Kobieta poszukiwana” (A Wanted Woman) in 2009 (the Brown Castle Award at the “Off Cinema in Poznan, a honourable mention at the Koszalin Festival of Movie Debuts “Młodzi i Film”). Co-operated on the “Aktorzy” (Actors) directed by Tomasz Wolski and “Pierwszy Dzień” (The First Day) by Marcin Sauter
