NEWS

12/10/2017

“A Heart of Love” trailer came out today

Considering “A Heart of Love’s” excellent reception at the Rotterdam and Berlin festivals, we might go so far as to say that this modest yet mesmerizing picture will do better abroad this year than high-budget Polish productions. The film will premiere in Poland on December, 1.

The protagonists of A Heart of Love are Wojciech Bąkowski (Jacek Poniedziałek) and Zuzanna Bartoszek (Justyna Wasilewska). Bąkowski is a musician, poet, and visual artist; awarded the “Paszport Polityki “prize seven years ago, he attained a unique status in the artistic community of Poland. Bąkowski’s passion about discovering the paradoxes of everyday life, peeking underneath its surface, and repeating seemingly trivial occurrences to turn them into separate, self-propelling performances, is reflected on screen.

Due to his focus on the colors of mundanity, Wojciech Bąkowski is sometimes likened to the famous 20^thcentury Polish poet Miron Białoszewski. Very well acquainted with Bąkowski, Ronduda had at first planned to reprise the conventions of The Performerwith the artist playing himself.

Justyna Wasilewska in “Heart of Love”, dir. Łukasz Ronduda

After hours of discussion with Bąkowski, they arrived at the final concept of A Heart of Love as a chronicle of the artist’s relationship with Zuzanna Bartoszek, a young (born in 1993) poet, illustrator, performer and voguing enthusiast. The result was completely unexpected: watching A Heart of Love gives us the impression that Bartoszek and Bąkowski let us into their private world, sharing their own lives with us. Part of it is probably due to their collaboration with Robert Bolesta on their on-screen dialogues.

Additionally, Bąkowski composed the movie’s soundtrack. Ronduda also found a way to get the camera as close as possible to his protagonists while meticulously avoiding any disruption to the autonomy of their identities. Personally, what I find particularly fascinating about A Heart of Love is the fact that we can’t be completely certain whether we’re watching Bąkowski and Bartoszek’s emotions and actions faithfully depicted on the silver screen – or experiencing a performance branded and supported by the two artists, a game, a trick played on viewers, a cunningly crafted trap.

The film will premiere in Poland on December, 1.