23/01/2009

Watch the video interviews from the Trieste Film Festival

Following James Joyce, the subject of a philological and rare tribute, Dostoevsky is the most “influential” writer of the Trieste Film Festival (January 15-22), with two adaptations of The Brothers Karamazov offered. Besides Giacomo Gentilomo’s 1947 film version, the festival competition includes the more unusual The Karamazovs [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Czech filmmaker Petr Zelenka, winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at the latest Karlovy Vary Film Festival.

What is unusual, for starters, is the location: the same Krakow steel mill in which Andrzej Wajda shot Man of Marble in 1977. Here, among the workers, a company of Prague actors (playing themselves) travel to Poland to stage an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s novel (written by Evald Shorm, an acclaimed Czech filmmaker of the 1960s who was forced into silence by the Communist regime and died in 1988).

Relations between the cast members are tense, but the long rehearsal process (which runs the entire film) is upset even further by the personal tragedy of the factory serviceman (Andrzej Mastalerz). His son lies dying after falling off a ledge and as rehearsals proceed, the more he and his co-workers find that the text in question strikes their most intimate chords.

Featuring a magnificent ensemble cast (led by Ivan Trojan, previously in Zelenka’s Wrong Side Up), the film is even dazzlingly intertwines, without a solution or continuity, theatre and reality. The screenplay briefly touches upon recent history – Lech Walesa, Pope John Paul II, a stab at Emir Kusturica – yet it never gives into the temptation of making the text topical.

Rather, the director is interested in how the Karamazovs’ words resonate in a new context, a steel inferno that is both majestic and monstrous, transformed by the elegant camera movements and photography of DoP Alexander Surkala, and accompanied by a score from Oscar winner Oscar Jan Kaczmarek.

Produced in the Czech Republic by První Verejnoprávní, the film also received Polish funds from Warsaw Pact Film Production and support from broadcaster Ceská Televize, the Polish Film Institute and Eurimages. International sales are handled by Cinepol.

(Translated from Italian)