Cycle index

Before Twilight

dir. Jacek Bławut / Poland 2008 / 96’

subtitles: English

New Polish Films Competition 33 Scenes from Life, Afonia and Bees, Before Twilight, Forest, Four Nights with Anna, Mall Girls, Miracle Seller, My Flesh, My Blood, Rebound, Scratch, Snow White and Russian Red, Splinters, Unmoved Mover Section index

Cast

Jan Nowicki, Nina Andrycz, Sonia Bohosiewicz, Ewa Krasnodębska, Irena Kwiatkowska, Bożena Mrowińska, Danuta Szaflarska, Teresa Szmigielówna, Beata Tyszkiewicz, Zofia Wilczyńska, Stefan Burczyk, Wieńczysław Gliński, Witold Gruca, Roman Kłosowski, Kazimierz Orzechowski

Film description

Jacek Bławut, a fully fledged documentary filmmaker, made his feature debut using a film framework to depict an epoch which passes away with his characters. He persuaded residents of a Veteran Actor's Home in Skolimowo to act in front of his camera. He recorded the characters' improvised conversations, casual gestures, and distance from themselves.

Before the Twilight is a palimpsest: a film about actors and roles, about making art, about the big theatre of world and the small theatre of gestures and mimics, about distancing oneself from one's role and coming closer to it, about being hostage of one's image, about entrapment in supporting roles, about decades of animosities between the characters, about history treated as recent past which is not gone yet, about a generation gap. Bławut's film is also about remembrance and the specific phenomenon of the Polish culture related to it - a particular status of professional acting.

The main characters play Faust, which is a master key of interpretations. A drama about searching for eternal youth and happiness provides the characters with an opportunity to play roles which may be their last ones. The elderly people take on this task and once again, as so many times in their lives, they take their places, assign roles, and act.

Sebastian Liszka