Lech Majewski
A mix of fantasy and sci-fi, the film entwines Navajo lore with a reclusive trillionaire and his would-be biographer, creating a fascinating, mysterious and idiosyncratic vision of America.
What would it be like to step inside a great work of art, have it come alive around you, and even observe the artist as he sketches the very reality you are experiencing? From Lech Majewski, one of Poland's most acclaimed filmmakers, The Mill and the Cross is a cinematic re-staging of Pieter Bruegel's masterpiece "Procession to Calvary," presented alongside the story of its creation.
This dialog-free film, originally presented as 33 short films, is an experimental, bizarre set of meditations and flashbacks of the grotesque.
When a terminally-ill art historian meets an engineer, it is love and lust at first sight. But their love is threatened by her looming illness. With her remaining days on earth numbered, she chooses to fan the flames of her obsession by taking her lover on a trip to Venice, where the artist's work becomes the background for their physical passion and emotional discovery.
In the Polish town of Janow, during the 1930s, an occult commune was formed around Teofil Ociepka, an electrician at the local coal mine and a painter, who became a Master of Esoteric Science. Ociepka and his disciples, simple uneducated miners, searched for the Philosophers Stone and pursued spiritual perfection, which would permit them to penetrate the Principle and the Sense of the World and of
Bound to a suffocating existence, a young man embarks on a marvelous journey of the imagination, transforming ordinary details of his room into fantastic images of natural beauty, where the cycles of life mysteriously play themselves out.
The film is a biblical soap-opera whose action unfolds in the Californian desert. Karen and Wes's marriage is crumbling apart - like a sandcastle. Karen can't even make love to her husband any more - the sand has managed to get everywhere. Harry, a tax collector, is a witness to this marriage falling apart. As a civil servant he hears Wes confession. However he isn't able to help him. The omnipotent eye of television glitters above the desert - that raw allegory of America where neither the white nor the black have it good. If Samuel Beckett and Joan Collins had a romance, then their child would look like this film.
Inspired by the tale of Telemachus in Homer’s Odyssey, young Adam’s mother is persecuted by the state police because his father fought in WWII as a pilot before disappearing. Adam fantasizes about his father and one day, while watching Godard’s Contempt in the cinema, finds himself transported into the dressing room of Brigitte Bardot and into a world where he meets a coterie of her contemporary celebrities.
