03/12/2010

Polish director Andrzej Jakimowski’s keenly anticipated follow up to his multiple award-winning Tricks [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Andrzej Jakimowski
interview: Tomasz Gąssowski
film profile] will be his first English-language feature, Flying Blind (working title).

Casting is currently underway for European A-list talent in Germany, the UK and France for a spring 2011 shoot in Lisbon.

Based on Jakimowski’s own script, the film follows Ian, a charismatic and blind spatial orientation instructor, who arrives at a reputed Lisbon ophthalmological clinic where he is in charge of sessions with blind patients. He uses unconventional methods, and during his sessions Ian quickly wins the trust of his students. One of them, a young woman named Eva, becomes his special project.

The €2.5m budgeted project is a UK/Poland/France/Portugal co-production between ZAiR (Warsaw), KMBO (Paris), Filmes do Tejo II Multimedia (Lisbon) and Film and Music Entertainment (London) and is funded by the Polish Film Institute, France’s National Film Centre (CNC), the Instituto do Cinema e do Audiovisual, Canal + Cyfrowy Poland and Forum Film Distribution.

Jakimowski says, “The subject of spatial orientation by blind people is fascinating. The remarkable and rarely used technique of ‘echolocation’ used by Ian is only one element of this phenomenon. In fact he pays much more attention to imagination than any sensory perception. This is the outcome of several months’ research into spatial orientation techniques used by blind people – and more broadly by research into the reality of blind people’s lives. I find some of their methods poetic and absolutely cinematic at the same time.”