On March 30 the gal­lery will be closed



Libera’s full-​length film debut. A cinematic exten­sion of the artist’s futuristic and post-​humanistic thoughts about the end of civilization of the white man. The movie’s tension is built mostly by its sound­track (com­posed and co-​directed by Robert Piotrowicz), as well as the fic­titious lan­guage of the Con­teheli tribe remaining incom­prehen­sible for the viewers—conceived for the pur­pose of the film by Robert Stil­ler, a Polish translator and polyglot.

 

“Walser” was created as a result of the Film Award of the Polish Film Institute and the Museum of Modern Art which grants money for the produc­tion of a feature film by an artist wor­king between visual arts and cinematography. Libera has won the first edition of the con­test in 2011. All pictures were shot in autumn 2013 in Slovenia.

 

Official movie synopsis:

A tribe lost in the frin­ges of civilisation. The Con­tehli people have eyes blue like the flowers of flax, fair dreadlocks and young bodies. They look like the ful­fil­ment of hippie fan­tasies about going back to nature. Or like a Slavic ver­sion of Avatar. The forest people seem to be living in the Garden of Eden. But civilisation forces itself into this per­fect world in the form of a rail­way administration clerk: Walser. He tries to penetrate their bucolic world and learn their incom­prehen­sible lan­guage but all he brings is chaos and destruc­tion. This styled world of Walser flirts with the tradition of genre cinema: post-​apocalyptic sci-​fi, western or cavemen films where primitivism and “glamour” weren’t at all dis­sonant. The clichés known from genre films become blocks in the hands of Libera, who uses them to form a multi-​layered riddle of literary figures of a paradise lost; of philosophical and coun­ter­cul­ture con­cepts of a utopian com­munity or phan­tasms about the end of civilisation.







Zbigniew Libera
Walser

2015, feature film, 78 min.

Directed by: Zbigniew Libera

Written by: Grzegorz Jankowicz, Zbigniew Libera (co-operation: Robert Stiller)

Starring: Krzysztof Stroiński

DOP: Adam Sikora

Music: Robert Piotrowicz

Production: Magdalena Kamińska, Agata Szymańska – Balapolis

Co-production: Adam Mickiewicz Institute, National Centre for Culture Poland, Film District Remigiusz Przełożny, Studio Produkcyjne Orka

 

Premiere: July 2015 (T-Mobile New Horizons International Film Festival in Wrocław)

 
 

Photos courtesy of Balapolis