A Short Film about Love - KarazwLaimoon

Cine Club 7 December 2016

A Short Film about Love

Director: Krzysztof Kieślowski (1941 – 1996)

Language: Polish English S/T)
Duration: 1 hr 26 min

Link to IMDB: Click Here
YouTube Trailer: Click Here

SLANT Click Here

Guardian: Click Here

Synopsis:

Written by Kieślowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz, the film is about a young post office worker deeply in love with a promiscuous older woman who lives in an adjacent apartment building. After spying on her through a telescope, he meets and declares his love for this jaded woman who long ago gave up on believing in love. She responds to his innocence by initiating him on the basic fact of life—that there is no love, only sex. A Short Film About Love is an expanded film version Part 6 of Kieślowski's 1988 Polish language ten-part television series, Dekalog. The film is set in Warsaw. The film was selected as the Polish entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 61st Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee.

Krzysztof Kieślowski

Krzysztof Kieślowski (1941 – 1996) was an influential Polish art-house film director and screenwriter known internationally for Dekalog (1989), The Double Life of Veronique (1991) and the Three Colors Trilogy (1993–1994). He received numerous awards during his career, including the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize (1988), FIPRESCI Prize (1988, 1991) and Prize of the Ecumenical Jury (1991); the Venice Film Festival FIPRESCI Prize (1989), Golden Lion (1993) and OCIC Award (1993); and the Berlin International Film Festival Silver Bear (1994). In 1995 he received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Writing. In 2002 Kieślowski was listed at number two on the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound Top Ten Directors list of modern times.

Kieślowski was born in Warsaw. He grew up in several small towns, moving wherever his engineer father, a tuberculosis patient, could find treatment. He was raised Roman Catholic and retained what he called a "personal and private" relationship with God. At sixteen, he attended a firefighters' training school, but dropped out after three months. Without any career goals, he then entered the College for Theatre Technicians in Warsaw in 1957 because it was run by a relative. He wanted to become a theatre director, but lacked the required bachelor's degree for the theatre department, so he chose to study film as an intermediate step.

Leaving college and working as a theatrical tailor, Kieślowski applied to the Łódź Film School, the famed Polish film school which also has Roman Polanski and Andrzej Wajda among its alumni. He was rejected twice. To avoid compulsory military service during this time, he briefly became an art student and also went on a drastic diet in an attempt to make himself medically unfit for service. After several months of successfully avoiding the draft, he was accepted to the Łódź Film School on his third attempt.

He attended from 1964 to 1968, during a period in which the government allowed a relatively high degree of artistic freedom at the school. Kieślowski quickly lost his interest in theatre and decided to make documentary films. Kieślowski also married his lifelong love, Maria (Marysia) Cautillo, during his final year in school (m. 21 January 1967 to his death) and they had a daughter, Marta (b. 8 January 1972).

Kieślowski retired from film-making with a public announcement after the premiere of his last film Red at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival.