First Look 2020 Festival

sci-fi cult epic On the Silver Globe directed by Andrzej Zulawski
followed by the masterclass with a cinematographer Andrzej J. Jaroszewicz
and
US Premiere of Bird Talk (Mowa ptaków) directed by Xavery Zulawski (in person),
screenplay by Andrzej Zulawski, cinematography by Andrzej J. Jaroszewicz (in person)
as part of First Look 2020 Festival

Bird Talk – March 13th, 8PM
On the Silver Globe – March 14th, 12PM
Masterclass with Andrzej Jaroszewicz – March 14th, 2:45PM

Museum of the Moving Image
Redstone Theater
36-01 35 Ave, Astoria, NY 11106

Tickets:
$15 – Bird Talk
$15 – On the Silver Globe 

„It’s among the most visually extravagant films ever made.”—Richard Brody, The New Yorker

„Zulawski’s masterpiece, the almost indescribable (…) comparable for sheer weirdness to David Lynch’s “Dune” – James Hoberman, The New York Times

The Museum of the Moving Image in partnership with the Polish Cultural Institute in New York is proud to present a digital restoration of Andrzej Zulawski‘s sci-fi cult epic On the Silver Globe, the most ambitious and difficult project of his career, which critics have compared to David Lynch’s Dune and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain. The film will be screened in conjunction with MoMI’s exhibition Envisioning 2001: Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey and with the US Premiere of Bird Talk, directed by Andrzej Zulawski’s son’s, Xavery Zulawski at the First Look 2020 Festival.

The screening of On the Silver Globe will be followed by an illuminating multimedia lecture on the making of the film by the long-time collaborator of Andrzej Zulawski, cinematographer Andrzej J. Jaroszewicz (Possession, On the Silver Globe, La Note Bleue).

On the Silver Globe, dir. Andrzej Zulawski. Poland. 1988, 157 mins. The largest Polish production of all time when shooting began in 1976, was halted by the Ministry of Culture for two years due to accusations of subversiveness. The film was finally reconstituted and completed after the fall of Communism over a decade later. The resulting film follows a group of astronauts who, after crash-landing on the moon, forge a new society. As the first generation dies off, their children devise new rituals and mythologies to structure the emergent civilization, until a politician from Earth arrives and is hailed as the Messiah… An inexhaustibly inventive and absorbing film maudit that quite literally creates a new cinematic world, On the Silver Globe is perhaps the grandest expression of Zulawski’s visionary artistry. Now this very rarely screened film returns in a new digital restoration personally approved by Zulawski and director of photography Andrzej Jaroszewicz.

Bird Talk, dir. Xawery Zulawski. Poland. 2019, 138 mins. Working from an unrealized script by his father, the late master Andrzej Zulawski, award-winning Polish filmmaker Xawery Zulawski unleashes Bird Talk, a wild, urgent, friskily entertaining explosion of cinema. In a society increasingly leaning towards conformity, faith, and reactionary politics, we encounter characters operating on the fringes: a history teacher who is a stickler for inconvenient facts, another teacher whose sense of justice gets him fired for physically confronting a student, a cleaning lady, a florist, a composer suffering from leprosy, and an aspiring student filmmaker. Frenetic, referential, unapologetically verbose, stylistically elastic, and spilling into hybrid nonfiction in ways that feel shocking at times, Bird Talk has a headlong, anarchic spirit that honors the elder Zulawski’s legacy while also feeling entirely of the moment. With cinematography by longtime Andrzej Zulawski collaborator Andrzej J. Jaroszewicz (Possession, On the Silver Globe). With Sebastian Fabijanski, Eryk Kulm Jr., Jasmina Polak, Sebastian Pawlak, Zaneta Palica, Andrzej Chyra, Marta Zmuda Trzebiatowska, Borys Szyc, Daniel Olbrychski, Katarzyna Chojnacka. With director Xawery Zulawski and DP Andrzej J. Jaroszewicz in person

Andrzej Zulawski (1940 – 2016) director, screenwriter, novelist, essayist and actor has created a body of work unlike any other. His debut feature The Third Part of the Night (1971) defined his exuberant style, which developed over the course of his career in Poland and France. Zulawski’s filmmaking is like an expressive dance, with non-linear storytelling and elements of surrealism, where extravagance of form serves as a metaphor for conflicting forces within the human soul and a desperate search for the truth, beauty, the absolute, and salvation. Zulawski remains one of Poland’s and Europe’s most radical and appreciated filmmakers.

Xawery Zulawski (1971), he was accepted in 1991 to the Lódz Film School. His first feature, CHAOS (2005), received awards for best debut at the Gdynia FF and the Grand Prix at the Koszalin’s Youth&Film Festival. Xawery’s next film, Snow White And Russian Red (2009), adapted from the controversial best-selling novel by Dorota Maslowska, received many awards in Poland, among them, the Silver Lions and Best Actor prize (for Borys Szyc) at the Gdynia FF, as well as excellent critics’ reception.

Andrzej J. Jaroszewicz (1935) is a cinematographer who has worked on over 50 films. A long-time collaborator of Andrzej Zulawski, he worked with him on such films as „ The Devil”, „On the Silver Globe”, „Possession”, „Szamanka”, „La Note Bleue”.

From the Polish Cultural Institute.