XI International Film Festival
in Olsztyn „Prison Movie"
12.10.2023
11th EDITION
XI International Film Festival
WINNERS
XI INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL IN OLSZTYN
„PRISON MOVIE” 2023
The Good Villain Statuettes was awarded to:
GRAND PRIX
SALVATORE PRESTI
Dopo Questo Esilio
Rehabilitation Qualities
ANDRE MONIZ VIEIRA Tregua
Alternative Viewpoint
SEBASTIAN JUSZCZYK, MATEUSZ PRZYŁĘCKI
Nie moja wina, ale moja kara
Special Award
SEBASTIAN JUSZCZYK
(Nie) przerwane więzi
Special Award
MACIEJ JANKOWSKI
Broken Head
Special Award
PATRYCJA POLKOWSKA
Efekt Halo
XI INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL IN OLSZTYN
„PRISON MOVIE” 2023
Films submitted to the “Prison Movie” Festival in 2023
The descriptions of the films are taken from the Entry Cards
PROFESSIONAL FILMS
Film title:
NIE MOJA WINA, ALE MOJA KARA
production year: 2021
film duration: 6:10
screen play: Ewelina Startek oraz dzieci
direction: Sebastian Juszczyk, Mateusz Przyłęcki
cinematography: Sebastian Juszczyk
music: Sebastian Juszczyk
Description of film:
“In Europe, more than 2 million children are separated from a parent who is serving a prison sentence. For a child, the deprivation of his or her parent’s liberty not only means the loss of a person important to them, but also involves shame, marginalization, stigmatization and peer exclusion. Children of incarcerated persons are the silent victims of crime, as they bear the emotional and social burden of a situation in which they are not at fault.
Every year, the international networking organization organizes the social campaign “Not my crime, still my sentence” – “Not my fault, but my punishment.” In 2021, as part of organizing the campaign, the Malopolska Probation Association produced a film in which it gave full voice to children with the experience of a parent in prison. In the film, we can hear the original voice of the children assisted by the Association, while in order to protect the image of these children, the film features actors.”
Film title:
PRZYGODY PĘDRKA WYRZUTKA
production year: 2020
film duration: 10:11
direction: Michał Kacprzak i Agnieszka Bresler
screen play: Michał Kacprzak
cinematography: Michał Kacprzak
production: Stowarzyszenie Kolektyw Kobietostan
Description of film:
In the second half of July 2020, an unusual project took place at the Prison in Krzywanec, born from a combination of the long-standing Forest Colony program and the Summer in the Theater program implemented for the second time at the Prison by the Womenostan Collective. The incarcerated women were able to take part in a unique two-week creative process focused on rebuilding and strengthening relationships in a special correspondence-circling formula developed because of the pandemic. On the first day, the children of participating women received packets in the mail with creative task maps and materials to work on for the full two weeks during which they remained in daily contact with the facilitators and mothers. In addition, each day the young participants received the next episodes of the radio play about the adventures of Pędrek and video messages from the moms, which were implemented by the facilitators together with the mothers at the Penitentiary.
During the second week, the team of facilitators visited each child at home, shooting a music video for a song created as part of the creative tasks and collecting the children’s artwork. The pieces created with each other formed a sculpture of Pędrek, which was set up and ceremoniously unveiled at the end of the project in the courtyard of the Krzywaniec Prison. It was also the moment for the premiere of the music video and song WHO I AM, to which the stanzas were arranged and rapped by the children, and the chorus by the mothers. The book that helped the presenters build this bridge was Stefan Themerson’s The Adventures of Pfdrek the Outcast, a fairy tale about the search for one’s own identity and social acceptance of otherness. In addition to women currently serving sentences of imprisonment, participants of the previous edition of the program, who were already at liberty, took part in the project along with their children, creating together an ensemble that transcended divisions and exclusion, proving the extraordinary power of theater as a tool of re-socialization.
Film title:
DRUŻYNA KOPERNIKA
production year: 2023
film duration: 7:05
direction: Jacek Suwor
screen play: Jolanta Wiszniewska
cinematography: Jacek Suwor
music: Baza muzyczna Envanto Elements
Description of film:
A report describing the “Team Copernicus” project, in which professional artists together with inmates create a single painting composed of 21 smaller works.
Film title:
EFEKT HALO
production year: 2019
film duration: 14:00
direction: Patrycja Polkowska
screen play: Patrycja Polkowska
cinematography: Alicia Devaux
production: Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Filmowa, Telewizyjna i Teatralna im. L. Schillera w Łodzi
Description of film:
Pick a spot and observe. Eavesdrop. The film’s protagonists are alumni of a correctional facility. Studzieniec is an open-ended facility that resembles a forced colony more than a rigorous prison. In such a place you don’t serve a time-limited sentence – when you get there you can leave only on your twenty-first birthday. The main means of contact with the outside world is a landline telephone located in the educator’s room.
Film title:
(NIE) PRZERWANE WIĘZI
production year: 2023
film duration: 1:22
direction: Sebastian Juszczyk
screen play: Ewelina Startek, Sebastian Juszczyk, Jagoda Bielawska
cinematography: Sebastian Juszczyk
music: Sebastian Juszczyk
Description of film:
In Europe, more than 2 million children are separated from a parent who is serving a prison sentence. For a child, the deprivation of his or her parent’s liberty not only means the loss of a person important to them, but also involves shame, marginalization, stigmatization and peer exclusion. Children of incarcerated persons are the silent victims of crime, as they bear the emotional and social burden of a situation in which they are not at fault. Many of these children miss their parent, unable to realize their right to contact with them. The film shows the prison reality in the area of parent-child contact, in which time is one of the most important factors. Limited, never enough, imposing pressure on the participants of the meeting.
Film title:
KOBIETOSTAN
production year: 2019
film duration: 13:37
direction: Agnieszka Bresler i Mira Boczniowicz
screen play: Mira Boczniowicz
cinematography: Mira Boczniowicz
production: Stowarzyszenie Kultura Oświata Teatr
Description of film:
The interdisciplinary project Kobietostan / Ofelie grew out of discord with the social marginalization of women from disadvantaged backgrounds and their voices, promoting the equality, empowerment and strength of women functioning outside the main social fabric. In the first half of 2019, a block of workshop meetings from the intersection of theater, visual arts, photography, film and literature was conducted for women inmates of the female ward of Prison No. 1 in Wroclaw. The artists leading the project -director Agnieszka Bresler and actress Anna Skubik – met with the participants for three months to jointly discover their voices, talents and ideas, and face the character of Shakespeare’s Ophelia. By analyzing and looking at Ophelia’s apparent weakness, they traced the causes of their own weaknesses and sought ways to transform them into strength. In finding Ophelia’s strength, they found their own. Parallel to the workshop work, a film documenting this process was created by Mira Boczniowicz in cooperation with Agnieszka Bresler”.
Film title:
PO DRUGIEJ STRONIE LUSTRA
production year: 2019
film duration: 6:49
direction: Paulina Galanciak-llczyszyn i Agnieszka Bresler
screen play: Paulina Galanciak-llczyszyn i Agnieszka Bresler
cinematography: Paulina Galanciak-llczyszyn i Agnieszka Bresler
production: Stowarzyszenie Kolektyw Kobietostan
Description of film:
„On the other side of the mirror” is a theatrical project by the Kobietostan Collective and the TIFF Collective Foundation aimed at children of women inmates of the Penitentiary in Krzywaniec near Zielona Gora. As part of Summer in the Theater at the prison’s hotel complex, the children took part in a 2-week program of theater and art workshops culminating in a performance. In the process of building it, they were accompanied by their mothers, helping to sew costumes, prepare scenery or build scenes. On the last day of the project, the entire team entered the prison to transform the austere and unfriendly visiting room into a theatrical space, a fantastic world of chess, magical characters and an alternate reality, following the stories from the book Alice on the Other Side of the Mirror by Lewis Carroll. The final show in the visiting room was open to other inmates, the prison administration, the families of the children participating in the project, and local authorities and the public. For the duration of the show, the theater became a tool for “disenchanting” the cruel prison space, transforming it into an amazing, extraordinary place, filling it with children’s faith, imagination and energy.
Film title:
Dopo Questo Esilio
production year: 2023
film duration: 30:00
direction: Salvo Presti
screen play: Salvo Presti
cinematography: Emanuele Torre
music: E l’ora dell’amore – I Camaleonti – CBS, ‘Davide’ – Livio Minafra – Egea Music, ‘Ave Maria’ – Pietro Mascagni -Arrangement Franco Mancuso
Description of film:
It is said that time soothes all pain, heals all wounds. This film project, born thanks to a project of the provincial CPIA of Messina and made inside the prison of Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto (Me), tells of wounds of the soul, of reflections on possible ways of overcoming. The set is the old school/library of the judicial psychiatric hospital, an almost metaphysical space, full of now obsolete objects, of pain and smiles lost in time.
Vito, the protagonist of the docufilm, during his time in detention,finds in a corner of his memory the memory of a ‘rescue’ at sea, the abduction of a girl from the coils of a stormy sea and from death. A rescue that in the catharsis of memories and in its unveiling becomes ‘salvation’ of himself, mysterious protection from the jungle of evil that envelops human fragility, from a precarious path made up of risky relationships in a territory suffocated by ruthless mechanisms of violence for survival. Thus also for all the others, removed from the fluidity of time, the age of innocence, the splendours and miseries of childhood resurface, music as an art. That goes beyond words and scans now lost photographs, existential ruptures and attempts at adjustments. And finally, memory and love, an indissoluble combination for every human narration. And then Sicily, a land of abandonment and desolation, of violence and suspensions of buzzing sunshine, of betrayed and badly digested modernity. The silences of lost corners remain, dusty suburbs, removed bowels, forgotten dead, which however in struggle oblivion can also become poetic resilience, rocks of meaning in the stormy sea of banality and ugliness, unspeakable lyrics, slowness against the tide, search for origins. That girl saved on a distant summer day has become a woman, the inextricable plot of underground correspondences leads to the wound of a Marian painting, where she will be able to repair a forgotten world, the only possible sign of love beyond violence.
Film title:
TAINTED LOOP
production year: 2023
film duration: 50 min
direction: Lorrin Deleanu
screen play: Lorrin Deleanu
cinematography: Videografiasi.ro
music: Various Artists – Artlist
production: LORRINART FILMS S.R.L. Botosani Romania
Description of film:
The film brings to the fore, the young it-istAnrei, who, due the financial problems he is facing, turns to artificial intelligence to get out of the impasse. He learns from the artificial intelligence about a holy card, from which he can obtain an amount of money, but can be use only in compliance with a set of rules. Andrei doesn’t respect these rules and withdraws a larger amount of money, ending up in prison. Here, he is subjected to many adventures, and later he benefits for a day outside the prison, which helps him realize that freedom is much more valuable than quick enrichment.
Film title:
BROKEN HEAD
production year: 2019
film duration: 41:36
direction: Maciej Jankowski
screen play: Maciej Jankowski
cinematography: Maciej Jankowski
Description of film:
Andrzej has serious problems with drugs. He is locked in prison, at special unit for old offenders.
In order to fight for relationship with his girlfriend, he decides to start therapy.
During this journey, he discovers his own emotions, and realizes, existence of the different layers of his own internal life. A fight for a girlfriend, becomes also fight for himself.
Will he succeed in this struggle?
Film title:
TREGUA
production year: 2022
film duration: 50:00
direction: Andre Moniz Vieira
screen play: Andre Moniz Vieira
cinematography: Andre Moniz Vieira, Luis Diniz
music: Max H.; Maya Belsitzman; Matan Ephrat; Palm Blue; Yehezkel Raz; (Copyright License Acquired)
production: Associacao Cultural Casa lnvisivel (Catarina Ciaro and Cristina de Sousa)
Description of film:
A captivating journey within the confines of “TREGUA “, a social-artistic project that unveils the transformative power of art behind prison walls. In this 50-minute film, witness the extraordinary collaboration between five talented artists and twelve individuals in confinement as they shatter stereotypes, redefine their identities, and create a remarkable merchandise line.
“TREGUA” serves as an eye-opening exploration of the inmates’ lives, showcasing their incredible artistic talents and highlighting their potential for personal growth and societal contribution. Through this project,funded by the participatory budget of Portugal, these men embark on a path of empowerment, breaking free from the limitations of confinement. Get immersed in the ten-month journey as these incarcerated individuals develop technical and artistic skills, finding solace and purpose in their creative expressions. Through their collaborative efforts, they establish the brand “TREGUA “, producing an entire merchandise line that reflects their passion, resilience, and talent.
With the breaking of stereotypes as a central theme, „TREGUA” challenges prevailing notions about life behind bars. It showcases the humanity, emotions, and interactions that exist within prison walls, proving that inmates have aspirations, potential, and dreams waiting to be realized. Through intimate interviews, breathtaking artwork, and behind-the scenes footage, this documentary invites you to reevaluate your preconceived notions and engage in a transformative dialogue.
Experience the power of art as a catalyst for change, fostering social integration, entrepreneurship, and the creation of employment opportunities. „TREGUA” is an invitation to the international community to join the Tregua team in their mission of bridging gaps, fostering understanding, and embracing the untapped potential of incarcerated individuals.
Film title:
CATHARSIS
production year: 2023
film duration: 32:47
direction: lulian Glita
screen play: Costin Mincu – inmate
cinematography: Alin George Anastasescu – inmate
music: Daniel Miron Dragomir – inmate
production: Happiness of Colors Association
Description of film:
The movie is following 5 characters, inmates at Bucharest-Rahowa Prison, their daily routines and their participation in a theater play/art. Reeducation program, and how this activity is helping them to overcome their anxiety and fears. Just like a Russ ion doll, the making of this film is part of another reeducation acticity, a art. Therapy proces for the production team, inmates at the same penitentiary.
Film title:
CONTRIBUTION from the Prison of Ferrara to the Contest: Neighborhood I dream of
production year: 2023
film duration: 5:00
direction: Eugenio Melloni
screen play: Eugenio Melloni with the laboratoriaI participation of prisoners Marco, Lorenzo, Harrison, lnge, Adberrhaim, Francesco, Davide
music: Stefano Mario Ricatti, music given to free use, taken from the song „11 sogno”
realization: IO sottoscritto acconsento, all’interno del festiwal, alla proiezione parziale o completa del film in formato digitale / I hereby consent to, within the frame work of the Festiva, piecemeal o comprehensive presentation of the film in the electronic
Description of film:
February 2023, the Administration of the Municipality of Ferrara (Italy), together with Voluntary Associations made a contest asking citizens to write suggestions or to take videos of 5 minutes, about how to improve the neighborhoods where they live. Even some prisoners from the prison of the city Ferrara, decided to participate. Eventually, they won the first prize in the video section. The award ceremony was held with an event open to the public on May 4. The creation of the video for participation in the contest, was possible thanks to the Cinema Laboratory which takes place inside the prison, cooridnated by the volunteer director and sreenwriter, Eugenio Melloni.
The initial laboratory work of the group focused on how it was possible to make the opportunity offered by the city contest, a moment of dialogue between the inside and outside the prison. The conclusion was this it was necessary to tell that Beauty can live in all places.
Full HD Video shooting with professional cameras. Post production by the director. Organization shooting: Prison Directorate and Educational Services.
Film title:
ACROSS WALLS
production year: 2023
film duration: 33:00
direction: Miriam Cossu Sparagano Ferraye
screen play: Miriam Cossu Sparagano Ferraye
cinematography: Miriam Cossu Sparagano Ferraye
Description of film:
Jn the spring of 2022, a .filmmaker and a sociologist entered the Ucciardone Prison House in Palermo with the intention of involving a group of inmates in the writing of a.film on the prison/socjety relationship through the aid of the Funkino participatory methodology.
This is how the attempt to give life to a film written through the delicate collection of personal stories then channeled with the group into a single collective story was begun and is still being carried out.
Film title:
ZAMKNIĘTY ŚWIAT Grupa Interwencyjna Służby Więziennej
production year: 2022
film duration: 23:00
direction: Kinga Wasilewska
screen play: Kinga Wasilewska
cinematography: Adam Kossakowski, Maciej Dmowski
music: Baza muzyczna „Paris Music”
production: TVP 3 Bydgoszcz
Description of film:
They are officers for special tasks. Properly selected and trained, they must be ready for anything. Among other things, they get into ‘action’ when inmates are aggressive and do not want to conform to the prison rules. What do the members of the Prison Intervention Group face?
AMATEUR FILMS
Film title:
SZTUK DOSTĘPNA
production year: 2022
film duration: 10:00
direction: Alicja Borsiak-Śleszyńska, Katarzyna Oleszczuk
screenplay:: Alicja Borsiak- leszy ska, Katarzyna Oleszczuk
Zdjęcia: Agata Młynik
cinematography: Jacek Leszyński
production: Stowarzyszenie POSTIS
Description of film:
The film is the result of cooperation between the Olsztyn Detention Center and the Pastis Association in the field of social readaptation of convicts.
Film title:
GISW Special Forces 2022
production year: 2022
film duration: 03:12
direction: Łukasz Róg
screenplay: Łukasz Róg
cinematography: Łukasz Róg
music: Johann Johannsson
Description of film:
The video shows the work of the Prison Service intervention group.
Film title:
8 godzin bliżej
production year: 2023
film duration: 04:44
direction: Paweł Jezierski
screenplay: Paweł Jezierski
cinematography: Paweł Jezierski
music: Audiomautix https://goo.gl/dZg3Us
production: Areszt Śledczy w Białymstoku
Description of film:
8 hours in the Life of a Computer Scientist.
Film title:
ODCISK ŁAPY
production year: 2023
film duration: 03:43
direction: Adam Moroz
screenplay: Adam Moroz
cinematography: Adam Moroz
music: lllenium-Georgia Kill – hold on Ali Bakgor Remix
Description of film:
Service dog – special through the lens of a guide / handler.
Film title:
KARP KOI
production year: 2022
film duration: 25:00
direction: Arkadiusz Hołojuch
screenplay: Arkadiusz Hołojuch
cinematography: Arkadiusz Hołojuk, Przemysław Cieślak
music: Arkadiusz Hołojuk, Przemysław Cieślak
production: ,,Oddział Zewnętrzny w Dobrowie Aresztu Śledczego w Koszalinie.
Description of film:
Tom is sent to a penitentiary. His plan to serve his sentence is simple. He thinks that all he has to do is adjust to doing nothing, wait it out and serve his time.
He is put to work at the library, where he sees his peaceful haven and the perfect place to do nothing. However, the prison mundane of the day becomes tiresome for him. He meets Martin on his way, whose attitude makes him rethink. He sees in him commitment, strength and determination. Tom discovers that Marcin, with his persistence in action, reminds him of a fish that keeps struggling against the current as it swims upstream…
Film title:
PODRÓŻ “DO WNĘTRZA”
production year: 2022
film duration: 04:00
direction: Forte Ivan (deatined)
screenplay: Detainees
cinematography: Forte Ivan (detained)
music: Forte Ivan
Description of film:
This is a short film, completely written, directed and realized by the prison guests of the Paola Circondarial House, with the few means place dat their disposal, in the context of the re-educational acitivities. The theme selected was that of the violation of human rights they suffered during their life. Each one released their own emtotions.