Slavic Film Series: Body (Cialo)
Directed by: Malgorzata Szumowska, Poland, 2015
Organized by Gabriella Ferrari and Elizaveta Mankovskaya
Sponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature and the Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies
Location: Rocky/Mathey Theater
Date/Time: 04/21/16 at 7:00 pm – 04/21/16 at 9:00 pm
Malgorzata Szumowska’s dark dramedy already garnered the Silver Bear for Best Director at 2015 Berlin Film Festival. It is composed of a series of wry vignettes set in a bleak Warsaw. The story follows a widowed criminal investigator, desensitized to the dead bodies he sees on a daily basis, who wanders from one crime scene to the other. His anorexic daughter binges on junk food and grieves her recently deceased mother. A therapist, whose day job is to help people with eating disorders, in her spare time works as a psychic transcribing messages from the dead. Slightly esoteric and eccentrically absurd, the film weaves all three plotlines together into one single ‘Body’. In doing so, the film offers a highly original take on our relationship to our bodies and our sensory experience of the world. Centered around the idea of bodies and their limits, Szumowska’s film is also an anthropological comment on present-day Poland, a country with a conflicted sense of self, torn between the past and the present.
Category: PIIRS