East of the West 2001 / Egoiści / Poland 2000
The four heroes of the film, Anka, Filip, Smutny and Mlody, are members of the young Warsaw elite. Their life flows along to the rhythm of endless parties, deafening music, liberated sex, drugs and alcohol. Anka desperately tries to save her disintegrating relationship before she leaves on a long study trip abroad. The respected architect Filip is unable to bear the pain of breaking up with his male lover and, after a series of wild orgies, decides to burn himself alive in his exclusive home. Mlody, yearning only for big money, tries to come to terms with the idea that he is to become a father. The talented musician Smutny, who hides his sensitive soul beneath a mask of sarcastic comments, has to decide what to do about his future. Together, these fragments of life create an image of the new Warsaw at the end of the 1990s. A city whose isolated inhabitants, saturated with the stench of riotous parties, are incapable of offering or receiving love. A city whose drunken residents live in a world ruled only by cynicism, superficiality and emptiness.
100 min / Black & white, 35 mm
Director Mariusz Treliński
/ Screenplay Mariusz Treliński, Przemyslaw Nowakowski, Wojciech Nowak
/ Dir. of Photography Grzegorz Kuczeriszka
/ Music Pawel Miketyn
/ Editor Mielenia Fiedler
/ Producer Pawel Rakowski
/ Production Skorpion Art
/ Cast Magdalena Cielecka, Olaf Lubaszenko, Agnieszka Dygant, Jan Frycz, Rafal Mohr, Marek Zerański, Wiola Kolakowska
Mariusz Treliński (b. 1962) studied film direction at the Lódź film school. In 1990-1992 he worked as artistic director of the Karol Irzykowski Film Studio. He has directed several operas and plays, both at home (the Warsaw opera house presented Treliński’s adaptation of Madame Butterfly and King Roger), and abroad (Heart Ripper was produced at the Centre Pompidou in Paris). He is currently working on Othello in Germany and is planning to direct Madame Butterfly in Washington. He made the television film A Great Whale’s Rump (Zad wielkiego wieloryba, 1987) and the documentary Keyhole (Dziurka od klucza, 1987), also the film Farewell to Autumn (Pożegnanie jesieni, 1990) which was premiered at the Venice IFF. His film A Gentle Woman (Lagodna, 1995) was awarded at the Moscow IFF and the European Film Festival in Strasbourg.
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