Crossroads Cafe

Colour, 35 mm
Poland, 2005, 113 min
IP – International premiere
Section: East of the West - Films in Competition

Synopsis

A widowed mother sends her son Grześ, who has just finished high school, to Warsaw to find a well-paid job and help support the family. But he has no more luck than his neighbours in the dilapidated block of flats where the 13-year-old prostitute Dusia has attached herself to him. Grześ, who also has a retarded brother to look after, is tormented by his inability to prove he can get a decent job. His sister has solved her economic problems by living with an elderly, cynical senator and has come up with decent work, so her enthusiastic mother moves in with her. She has nothing but reproaches for Grześ and accuses him of egoism and incompetence. The young man meets sympathetic people in a similar situation in a cheap cafe, where bank security guard Gerard is also a regular. Life seems an unbearable dead end. Gerard thinks up a plan for robbing the bank without realising how easily the idea could end in tragedy. The action is punctuated by the songs of Kazik Staszewski about people at a crossroads in their lives, looking for a way out of a hazardous reality bereft of ideals.

About the director

Leszek Wosiewicz (b. 1947) studied psychology at the University of Cracow (1975) and direction at PWSFTViT in Lodź (1979). He works at the Silesian University in Katowice, and also directs for the stage and adapts world classics. He won major prizes for his documentaries, The Case of Herman Stoker (Przypadek Hermana Palacza, 1986) and Breaking the Silence (Przełamując ciszę, 2002). He made the feature films The Taste of Water (Smak wody, 1980) and Christmas Eve ’81 (Wigilija 81,1982), and for Kornblumenblau (1988), an incredible story of concentration camp survival, he won the Andrzej Munk Prize, the prize for direction in Gdynia, and Best Debut in Koszalin. He has since directed the films Cynga (1991), and House Chronicles (Kroniki domowe, 1997), and the successful TV series Moves (Przeprowadzki, 2000-2001) and Clinic of the Lonely Hearts (Klinika samotnych serc, 2005).