Jakub Duszyński

June and Jennifer Gibbons are twins from the only Black family in a small town in Wales in the 1970s and '80s. Feeling isolated from the community, the pair turn inward and reject communication with everyone but each other, retreating into their own fantasy world of inspiration and adolescent desires. After a spree of vandalism, the girls are sentenced to Broadmoor, an infamous psychiatric hospital, where they face the choice to separate and survive or die together.

Composed from the conversations that the director holds with people passing by in the street under his Warsaw apartment, each story in 'The Balcony Movie' is unique and deals with the way we try to cope with life as individuals. All together, they create a self-portrait of contemporary human life, and the passers-by present a composite picture of today's world.

Karolina works in an elementary school in the province. She passively waits for a great love. Life seems empty and colorless to her. Karolina's friend Jola, who decides to take fate into her own hands, has a different attitude to reality. This does not always bring positive results. One day Karolina meets Jan, who has come to the town for a seminar of young capitalists. Soon Jan leaves the town, and Karolina goes to Warsaw to meet him.

Roman Gutek sets off on a journey through time, back to Sanok, where New Horizons found safe harbour for its first edition. He revisits places that, for five fleeting minutes, played a part in the festival’s life, and left an indelible mark on a generation of Poles born in the 1970s and ’80s.

The events of this documentary about family history unfold in modern-day Warsaw, Paris, and Tel Aviv. As a matter of fact, Family Photo is the work created for the museum of the Polish Jews in Warsaw, and its Moscow Jewish Film Festival screening will become its wide screen debut. The film stars the family of its director (also a screenwriter, cinematographer, and editor) Jakub Duszyński — they look at old photographs at people who are long gone but are forever alive in other’s memories.

In 2001, during the first edition of the New Horizons Festival (held in the town of Sanok), we showed five Jonas Mekas films. A few months later, while in New York, I went unannounced to the Anthology Film Archives and met Mekas there. I was 29 years old and carrying a small video camera, which was on all the time, also during our conversation in a nearby café where Mekas liked to go. Twenty years later, I came across that recording on a mini DV cassette and edited it a little, using some fragments from Mekas’ movies. The result was a raw record of the moments that I wanted to remember. Jakub Duszyński