The 14th annual Polish Film Festival in America, produced by the Society for Arts, continues Friday, November 8, through Saturday, November 30. Screenings are at the Copernicus Center, 5216 W. Lawrence (tickets $9) and the Society for Arts, 1112 N. Milwaukee (tickets $7). Passes, available for $40 (five screenings) and $80 (twelve screenings), are good for all programs except the 3:00 screening Sunday, November 10; for more information call 773-486-9612. The schedule for November 8 through 14 follows; a complete schedule through November 30 is available on-line at www.chicagoreader.com. Programs marked with an * are highly recommended.
The Star
An Angel in Krakow
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The sound on the preview tape was so defective that I gave up watching, but I caught enough of the striking visuals and wacky humor (both somewhat Felliniesque) to regret the loss. The goofy plot concerns an angel named Giordano (Krzysztof Globisz) who loves rock so much and spends so much time in purgatory with singers like Elvis that he gets banished to earth with instructions to perform one kind deed per day. In Krakow, where he remains in phone contact with the folks upstairs, he meets a single mother and street sausage vendor (Ewa Kaim). Artur Wiecek “Baron” directed and cowrote this feature, in Polish with subtitles. 89 min. (JR) (Copernicus Center, 7:00)
One Hundred Minutes of Holidays
Chopin: Desire for Love
The moral wasteland of the Balkans war supplies the backdrop for this gripping story about a man and a boy who grow to love each other, if only to escape the hatred boiling around them. A shady character posing as a UNICEF official (Bob Hoskins) arrives in the Bosnian countryside in 1995, trying to recruit an orphan he’ll smuggle out of the country with a fake passport. The nine-year-old who takes him up on his offer (Sergiusz Zymelka) has been running wild with a gang of kids, scavenging for food and planting land mines against the Serb forces. The film is rife with images of polluted innocence–a child prostitute in heavy makeup staring at Hoskins through a wire fence, the boy serenely leafing through a comic book as he sits by a pile of corpses–and while the warmth between the two characters offers some sense of redemption, it’s mitigated by the fact that the kid’s last mine blew apart a girl no older than he is. Tomasz Wiszniewski directed a script he wrote with Robert Brutter. 93 min. (JJ) (Copernicus Center, 7:45)
