EWA PUSZCZYNSKA

QUO VADIS, AIDA? (2022)
Starring Jasna Đuričić, Izudin Bajrović, Boris Ler, Dino Bajrović, Boris Isaković, Emir Hadžihafizbegović, Raymond Thiry, Johan Heldenbergh, Joes Brauers and Reinout Bussemaker. Directed by Jasmila Žbanić.

Bosnia, July 1995. Middle-aged Aida is an English teacher in the small mountain town of Srebrenica. When the Serbian army ignores a formal UN ultimatum and begins a series of round-ups and brazen shellings, Aida and her family find themselves among over 30,000 besieged citizens attempting to shelter in a UN peacekeeper-operated military base on the outskirts of town, designed to house only a few thousand. Aida’s skills as a translator enable her to eventually bargain her husband and two sons inside, literally under the wire.

There, within the so-called safe zone, the harried and frantic Aida becomes party to the negotiations and to crucial information. While the support the UN can provide is crumbling, the situation intensifies with the arrival of vainglorious army commander Ratko Mladić, accompanied by his own camera crew. What is at the horizon for Aida’s family and people - rescue or death? Which moves should she make?

REVIEWS Quo Vadis, Aida? - A nightmarish vision of human tragedy & bureaucratic incompetence

COLD WAR (2018)
Starring Joanna Kulig, Tomasz Kot, Borys Szyc, Agata Kulesza, Cédric Kahn, Jeanne Balibar, Adam Woronowicz, Adam Ferency and Adam Szyszkowski. Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski.

A passionate love story between a man and a woman who meet in the ruins of post-war Poland. With different backgrounds and temperaments, they are fatally mismatched and yet fatefully condemned to each other. Set against the background of the Cold War in the 1950s in Poland, Berlin, Yugoslavia and Paris, the couple are separated by politics, character flaws and unfortunate twists of fate – an impossible love story in impossible times.

REVIEWS Cold War - Poles apart

THE CONGRESS (2014)
Starring Robin Wright, Harvey Keitel, Jon Hamm, Kodi Smitt-McPhee, Sami Gayle and Paul Giamatti. Directed by Ari Folman.

More than two decades after catapulting to stardom with The Princess Bride, an ageing actress (Robin Wright, playing a version of herself) decides to take her final job: preserving her digital likeness for a future Hollywood. A Hollywood studio will control her captured ‘image’, and she will star in any film they want with no restrictions. In return, she receives healthy compensation so she can care for her ailing son and her digitised character will stay forever young. 20 years later, under the creative vision of the studio’s head animator (Jon Hamm, Mad Men), Wright’s digital double rises to immortal stardom. With her contract expiring, she is invited to take part in ‘The Congress’ convention as she makes her comeback straight into the world of future fantasy cinema.

REVIEWS The Congress - Robin Wright through the looking-glass

IDA (2014)
Starring Agata Trzebuchowska, Agata Kulesza, Dawid Ogrodnik, Joanna Kulig, Adam Szyszkowski, Jerzy Trela, Artur Janusiak, Dorota Kuduk, Halina Skoczyńska and Natalia Lagiewczyk. Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski.

Poland 1962. Anna is a beautiful eighteen-year-old woman, preparing to become a nun at the convent where she has lived since orphaned as a child. She learns she has a living relative she must visit before taking her vows, her mother’s sister Wanda.

Together, the two women embark on a voyage of discovery of each other and their past. Her aunt, she learns is not only a former hard-line Communist state prosecutor notorious for sentencing priests and others to death, but also a Jew.