A tribe lost in the fringes of civilisation. The Contehli people have eyes blue like the flowers of flax, fair dreadlocks and young bodies. They look like the fulfilment of hippie fantasies about going back to nature. Or like a Slavic version of Avatar. The forest people seem to be living in the Garden of Eden. But civilisation forces itself into this perfect world in the form of a railway administration clerk: Walser. He tries to penetrate their bucolic world and learn their incomprehensible language but all he brings is chaos and destruction. This styled world of Walser flirts with the tradition of genre cinema: post-apocalyptic sci-fi, western or cavemen films where primitivism and “glamour” weren’t at all dissonant. The clichés known from genre films become blocks in the hands of Libera, who uses them to form a multi-layered riddle of literary figures of a paradise lost; of philosophical and counterculture concepts of a utopian community or phantasms about the end of civilisation.

About movie

  • Directed by
    Zbigniew Libera

  • Written by
    Grzegorz Jankowicz Zbigniew Libera
  • Starts
    Krzysztof Stroiński, Gustaw Klyszcz, Joanna Wiktorczyk
  • Cinematography
    Adam Sikora
  • Editor
    Beata Walentowska
  • Sound design
    Wojciech Mielimąka
  • Music
    Robert Piotrowicz
  • Make up
    Aleksandra Dutkiewicz
  • Costume design
    Ilona Binarsch
  • Art direction
    Zbigniew Libera, Sebastian Gomułka
  • Produced by
    Magdalena Kamińska, Agata Szymańska / Balapolis
  • Production
    Poland
  • Year
    2015
  • Running time
    78 min.

Premiere

15th T-Mobile New Horizons IFF
(New Horizons International Competition )