16/02/2005 - As the only Polish film in competition this year in Berlin, Ono (Stranger) by the young director Malgosia Szumowska is a very subtle approach of the moral dilemma an abortion raises

As the only Polish film in competition this year in Berlin, Ono [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (Stranger) by the young director Malgosia Szumowska attracted many professionals to its official screening which took place yesterday in the section Panorama Special. Of course they could not overlook the fact that the script of this film had already been noticed and selected for the Sundance International Film-makers Awards, and the many prizes the director won with her first feature film, (A Happy Man -2000), besides her nomination at the European Film Awards and her position in Variety magazine’s top ten young European directors. Her second work, the German and Polish coproduction Ono, confirms that all these distinctions were well-deserved..

The film is about Ewa, a 19-year-old girl who gets pregnant by mistake. Ono is in fact a very subtle approach of the moral dilemma an abortion raises. Under the pressure of her family, Ewa (brillianty interpreted by Malgorzata Bela) is on the verge on getting rid of the baby when the doctor tells her the fœtus can already hear her voice. She decides, therefore, first shily and then more willingly, to talk to her child and tell him about the world, with its good and its bad sides, which brings her to eventually learn more about herself and discover her love of life. Malgosia Szumowska chose a topic difficult to deal with but managed to do so with much skill - she was indeed formed at the famous school in Lodz where her final documentary work, Silence(1998), is still considered by this institution as one of its best productions (the first position being held by the great master Roman Polanski, with Deux hommes à l’armoire), and later was selected by Cinéfondation at the Cannes Film Festival for her fiction Extasy (1999).
Ono was produced by the German company Pandora Film, in association with the Polish Studio Filmowe Kalejdoskop and Telewizja Polska, and the international sales are handled by Bavaria Film International. It is also worth mentioning that the film was funded by the German Filmförderungsanstalt (FFA) and Filmstiftung NRW, as well as Eurimages, and the French/German TV channel ARTE.

(Translated from French)