EnergaCAMERIMAGE reveal final Main Competition films

EnergaCAMERIMAGE reveal three final films that will be screened in the Main Competition of the 31^st edition of EnergaCAMERIMAGE Film Festival.

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LEE

The film explores the most significant decade of Lee Miller’s (Kate Winslet) life. As a middle-aged woman, she refused to be remembered as a model and male artists’ muse. Lee Miller defied the expectations and rules of the time by traveling to Europe to report from the frontline during WWII. There, in part as a reaction to her own well-hidden trauma, she used her Rolleiflex camera to give a voice to the voiceless. What she captured on film in Dachau and throughout Europe was shocking and horrific. Her photographs of the war, its victims and its consequences remain among the most significant and historically important of the Second World War. She changed war photography forever, but Lee Miller paid an enormous personal price for what she witnessed and the stories she fought to tell.

Lee Miller’s story was brought to the big screen by the distinguished cinematographer Ellen Kuras for whom this is a feature debut as a director. On Lee she collaborated with Polish cinematographer Paweł Edelman form whom this will be fourth Main Competition. He won Bronze Frog in 1997 for Family Events and was nominated in 2016 for Afterimage as well as  in 2019 for The Office and the Spy. Also in 2019 he was nominated in the Polish Films Competition for his work on The Coldest Game. Both Paweł Edelman and Ellen Kuras will join us to introduce Lee EnergaCAMERIMAGE screening and attend the Q&A afterwards.

SOCIETY OF THE SNOW

In 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which had been chartered to fly a rugby team to Chile, crashed in the heart of the Andes. Only 29 of its 45 passengers survived the accident. Trapped in one of the most hostile and inaccessible environments on the planet, they have to resort to extreme measures to stay alive.

The emotionally intense Society of the Snow, this year’s Spain’s Oscar^® submission, was shot by Pedro Luque for whom this is not only first EnergaCAMERIMAGE Main Competition nomination but also first film screened in Toruń. We have presented several J.A. Bayona’s projects, most recently in 2022 when The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’s pilot episode was an entry in our TV Series Competition. Both Pedro Luque and J.A. Bayona will join us to introduce Society of the Snow EnergaCAMERIMAGE screening and attend the Q&A afterwards.

THE ZONE OF INTEREST

This year’s Cannes Grand Prix winner The Zone of Interest is director Jonathan Glazer’s (Sexy Beast, Birth and Under the Skin) film look into the everyday live of the Auschwitz concentration camp commander Rudolf Höss and his family. With Toni Erdmann’s Sandra Hüller and The White Ribbon’s Christian Friedel in the leading roles of Hewdig and Rudolf Höss. International media called The Zone of Interest a chilling and profound film (Variety) that will haunt you long after seeing it (Deadline), as well as a film that is terribly necessary to its time (Vanity Fair) and illustrating the banality of evil (Indiewire).

The Zone of Interest marks the first collaboration between director Jonathan Glazer and cinematographer Łukasz Żal. The film’s fixed shots that are filled with unspeakable emotions brought Żal his third EnergaCAMERIMAGE Main Competition nomination – previously, he was awarded with Golden Frog for Ida (shared with Ryszard Lenczewski, 2013) and Silver Frog for Cold War (2018). Żal was also nominated in four other Festival’s competitions: Student Etudes Competition (Mistrz świata, 2006), Short Documentary Films Competition (Paparazzi, 2011; Left Side of the Face, 2013; Joanna, 2013), Cinematographers’ Debuts Competition (The Here After, 2015) and Polish Films Competition (The Here After, 2015; The High Frontier, 2016). His cinematography for Paparazzi won him the Short Documentary Films Competition’s Golden Frog.