HISTORY IS A DREAM OF REGRET: THREE FILMS BY TADEUSZ KONWICKI

Tadeusz Konwicki’s idyllic teenage years in what was then interwar Lithuania ended with the outbreak of World War II. After his high school was shut down, he switched to a different sort of education — as a partisan, fighting first the Nazis, then the Soviet liberators who would annex Lithuania for the next 50 years (just as it had during Czarist domination of the former Polish-Lithuanian republic throughout the 19th century). Fleeing to Warsaw after the break-up of his unit, he became a journalist and writer, initially of popular Socialist Realist novels, but, as he became increasingly disillusioned with Communism by the mid-50s, of works that bitterly probed at the heart of a troubled Poland through memory, dream, and nightmare.

Now known mostly for blackly sardonic novels like 1979’s secretly published A Minor Apocalypse, in which a fading writer is selected by his literary peers to set fire to himself in protest of the Communist government, Konwicki also worked throughout his career in writing and directing films. Long unseen in the United States, his final three features of the 70s and 80s capture the end of the Soviet period in feverishly unforgettable images moving back from the present into the nearly mythological Polish literary past

HOW FAR AWAY, HOW NEAR
aka Jak daleko stad, jak blisko
dir. Tadeusz Konwicki, 1972
Poland, 95 minutes
In Polish, with English subtitles

TUESDAY, AUGUST 2 – 10:00 PM
THURSDAY, AUGUST 11 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 15 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 20 – 10:00 PM

ISSA VALLEY
aka Dolina Issy
dir. Tadeusz Konwicki, 1982
Poland, 110 minutes
In Polish, with English subtitles

MONDAY, AUGUST 1 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 10 – 10:00 PM
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21 – 5:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24 – 7:30 PM

LAVA
aka A Tale of Adam Mickiewicz’s ‘Forefathers’ Eve’ aka Lawa
dir. Tadeusz Konwicki, 1989
Poland, 129 minutes
In Polish, with English subtitles

THURSDAY, AUGUST 4 – 5:00 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 20 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, AUGUST 25 – 10:00 PM

http://www.spectacletheater.com/tadeusz-konwicki/