Another View 2016 / Córki dancingu / Poland 2015
An unconventional romance plays out in a bizarre late 1980s night club; at its centre, two mermaids and a bass guitarist. This Polish directorial debut is a tale of first love and disenchantment in a novel blend of genres: musical, fairy tale and horror movie.
It’s the late 1980s. Golden and Silver are mermaids who leave their undersea world and head towards a Warsaw nightclub where, thanks to their exquisite voices and singular physical proportions, they end up with glittering careers as singers and dancers. In the bizarre club environment they try out their first cigarette, their first shot, and their first kiss. They experience love and disenchantment and soon discover that things aren’t as wonderful as they had imagined. This tale of love, coming of age, gathered experience and abandoned illusions is the personal story of both the director and the artists behind the original music (the Wroński sisters), whose childhood is closely associated with life in the dance halls where their parents used to perform. And it’s this glitzy, decadent atmosphere that Agnieszka Smoczyńska has attempted to evoke in her genre-embracing debut. Here, Michalina Olszańska captures Golden’s dusky temperament with the kind of conviction she showed in her sociopathic role in I, Olga Hepnarova (2016), except that, in this case, truck manoeuvres are traded for sanguinary urges.
Kamila Dolotina
92 min / Color, DCP
Director Agnieszka Smoczyńska
/ Screenplay Robert Bolesto
/ Dir. of Photography Kuba Kijowski
/ Music Ballady i Romanse (Zuzanna Wrońska, Barbara Wrońska)
/ Editor Jarosław Kamiński
/ Art Director Joanna Macha
/ Producer Wlodzimierz Niderhaus
/ Production WFDiF – Documentary and Feature Film Studios
/ Coproduction Telewizja Polska S. A.
/ Cast Marta Mazurek, Michalina Olszańska, Kinga Preis, Jakub Gierszał, Andrzej Konopka
/ Contact WFDiF - Documentary and Feature Films Studios
Agnieszka Smoczyńska (b. 1978, Wrocław, Poland) studied film direction at the Krzysztof Kieślowski Film School in Katowice. Her distinctive style began to emerge early on in student films that impressed the juries at numerous international film festivals. Her short film Aria Diva (2007), describing the temptations of a life free of responsibility and the restraints of stability, won a series of national awards at the festival in Kraków. The director allows her imagination to run wild in her feature-film debut The Lure (2015), a heady mix of childhood memories and elements from all kinds of genres – melodramatic fairy tale, musical, thriller and horror. The film won Sundance’s Special Jury Prize for unique vision and design and also took away awards from the festivals in Nashville and Sofia.
WFDiF - Documentary and Feature Films Studios
Chelmska 21, 00-724, Warsaw
Poland
Phone: + 48 228 412 683
Fax: +48 228 415 891
E-mail: [email protected]
Agnieszka Smoczyńska
Film Director
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