The 17th Polish Film Festival in America runs Saturday, November 5, through Sunday, November 20, at the Beverly Arts Center, the Copernicus Center, and the Society for Arts, 1112 N. Milwaukee. Tickets are $8-$10; a festival pass, good for five screenings, is available for $45. Following are selected features screening Saturday through Thursday, November 5 through 10; for a full festival schedule visit www.pffamerica.com. Unless otherwise noted, all films are in Polish with subtitles. For more information call 773-486-9612.
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In the most extraordinary cross-dressing performance since Linda Hunt’s in The Year of Living Dangerously, 85-year-old character actress Krystyna Feldmann incarnates the wizened, semiautistic Polish “primitive” painter Nikifor. Krzysztof Krauze’s oddball biopic (2004) shows Nikifor wandering into the neat studio of the bureaucrat-sanctioned brush pusher Marian Wlosinski in 1960. Serenely oblivious to most of the social niceties of hygiene and behavior, he silently commandeers art supplies and a desk while offhandedly denigrating Wlosinski’s work, eventually derailing the young man’s career and marriage. As Nikifor obsessively paints buildings, villagers, and saints, crafting some 40,000 works, Wlosinski sacrifices everything to care for him, and the communist bureaucracy of the picturesque mountain resort town scrambles to cope with the decidedly problematic folk artist and his fame. 100 min. (Ronnie Scheib) (Wed 11/9, 7 PM, Beverly Arts Center)
This warmly intimate coming-of-age story (2004) is the latest from Pawel Pawlikowski, a native of Poland who got his start as a documentary director for the BBC (Tripping With Zhirinovsky) and graduated to dramatic features with Last Resort (2000). Based on a novel by Helen Cross, it follows the growing romance between a tony college student on summer vacation (Emily Blunt) and a tough Scottish girl (Nathalie Press) whose brother (Paddy Considine) has returned from prison a born-again Christian. This triangle is the entire story, but it’s so fraught with unresolved issues of class, sexuality, and spiritual need, and so carefully observed by Pawlikowski, that it opens out like the movie’s West Yorkshire countryside. In English. R, 86 min. (JJ) (Sun 11/6, 2 PM, Copernicus Center)
R Tulips
