Hope

Colour, 35 mm
Poland, Germany, 2007, 105 min
Section: East of the West - Films in Competition

Synopsis

The 20-year-old Franciszek witnesses the theft of a rare painting from a Warsaw church and records the event with an amateur camera. When he finds out that the burgler is art expert and gallery owner Benedykt Weber, he promises to keep quiet if the painting is returned to where it belongs. Weber however already has a customer, and the obsessively idealistic Franciszek is under all kinds of pressure from those close to him… This story about various kinds of blackmail ties into the work of Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski: after making the Three Colours trilogy (1993-94) Kieślowski and his favoured screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz planned another triptych, bound to the Christian collocation of faith, hope, and love, or heaven, hell, and purgatory. After the director’s untimely death in 1996, Piesiewicz’s screenplays resulted in Tom Tykwer’s Heaven (2002), L’Enfer (2005) by Danis Tanović, and finally Stanisław Mucha’s Hope. “In my country it’s hard for people to maintain hope. But hope is something that cannot be excluded from life. When I look around myself, it strikes me that if hope did not exist then I would have to quickly invent it,” says the director, whose feature film debut legitimately ties in to Kieślowski’s legacy.

About the director

Stanisław Mucha (b. 1970, Nowy Targ) studied acting and in 1994 worked as an actor and assistant director in the National Helena Modrzejewska Old Theater in Cracow. Between 1995 and 2000 he studied at the Konrad Wolf College of Film and Television (Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen) in Potsdam-Babelsberg. In 1999 he received a scholarship to the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. Mucha became famous for his feature-length documentary debut Absolut Warhola (2001 – audience award at the Film Festival Mannheim-Heidelberg) which was shown in the documentary film competition at the 37th IFF in Karlovy Vary. Here Mucha met with screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz and started up the Hope project with him, which he returned to his country to film. He has also directed the feature-length documentaries The Centre (Die Mitte, 2004) and Reality Shock (2005), both were screened at the Karlovy Vary IFF.