Film Archive

Kebab & Horoscope

East of the West - Competition 2014 / Kebab & Horoscope / Poland 2014

One day you read your horoscope in your favourite magazine The Secret World of Animals and the stars tell you to change your life and quit your job. Rather than risk the ire of higher spheres, you hand in your notice, throwing yourself into marketing instead. Increasing the marketability of carpets from a shop that hasn’t attracted a single customer, and whose eccentric staff show absolutely no appreciation for floor coverings, will be something of a challenge....

Synopsis

The workings of destiny are inscrutable. One day you read your horoscope in your favourite magazine The Secret World of Animals and the stars tell you to change your life and quit your job. Rather than risk the ire of higher spheres, you hand in your notice and, quite by chance, you come across the author of said horoscope in the kebab shop where you no longer work. Sharing existential insecurities, you find common ground and discover that marketing is a line of work that requires intuition rather than any specialist training. A carpet shop, which has never had a single customer cross its threshold, is an ideal place to start a business. The staff there harbour huge potential for eccentricity, and their lukewarm position on floor coverings presents you, as self-styled professionals, with something of a challenge. This self-assured feature debut by director Grzegorz Jaroszuk offers an absurdly comic perspective on a group of solitary figures who try, with varying degrees of success, to get to grips with their bizarrely woeful lives.

About the film

72 min / Color, DCP
World premiere
Director Grzegorz Jaroszuk / Screenplay Grzegorz Jaroszuk / Dir. of Photography John Magnus Borge / Music Wojciech Mazolewski / Editor Aleksandra Gowin / Producer Agnieszka Kurzydło / Production MD4 / Cast Bartłomiej Topa, Piotr Żurawski, Tomek Schuchardt, Justyna Wasilewska, Barbara Kurzaj, Andrzej Zieliński, Dorota Kolak, Janusz Michałowski / Contact New Europe Film Sales

About the director

Grzegorz Jaroszuk (b. 1983, Warsaw) studied film direction at PWSFTviT in Łódź (2005–11). As a student he shot several short films, such as Story of a Missing Car (2008) and the short documentary The Beginning of a New Season (Początek nowego sezonu, 2011). His graduate film Frozen Stories (Opowieści z chłodni, 2011) screened to success at numerous world festivals (e.g. the Locarno IFF, where it won one of the main prizes, and Sundance) and was also included in the main competition at the Prague Short Film Festival. Kebab & Horoscope (2014) is Jaroszuk’s feature debut.