Wilhelm Sasnal, acclaimed Polish painter and comic strip artist, expands further into filmmaking after several short Super 8 films and his first feature Swineherd (2008). His latest fiction feature It Looks Pretty from a Distance, co-directed and co-written with his wife Anna Sasnal, premiered in the New Polish Films Competition at the New Horizons International Film Festival and is a crass look onto a rural community and its self-controlled, repressive system. The feature has been awarded the Polish Film Competition main prize, the Wrocław Film Award.

Summer idyll. Rural silence. Three men unhurriedly chop an old car into pieces. But the landscape and rural life only look pretty for a very few minutes, before the unfinished houses and unhappy faces of the characters indicate that there is nothing to laugh about around there. On the contrary it is poverty and desolation that define everyday life and people’s rude behaviour. People act merciless and calculating – Paweł shifts off his dement mother to have the house to him and without further responsibilities. His girlfriend sticks around, taking care of the modest property in the hope of being married to him some day soon, knowing well that she won’t inherit anything from her family’s ground that will be passed on to her brother. When Paweł is not working on the scrap yard with his colleague Mirek, they drink beer and hang out at the nearby river; men stay for themselves, as women do, in this patriarchal arrangement. The monotonous daily routine is disturbed by Paweł’s disappearance, from which moment on a horrifying series of reactions takes place. A neighbour sets out to starve Paweł’s dog, coming back at night to plunder the house with her family, the next day with the nearby villagers to take whatever they can find and set the rest of the house on fire. Everyone knowing each other, they unaffectedly depredate and destroy in an unspoken, invisible social consensus. Everyday life seems to continue, but again the quietness is misleading, as further fatal acts of vengeance and vigilantism continue to happen.

Wilhelm Sasnal’s body of work is characterised by high awareness for political realities and especially Polish history. The setting of this film is rather timeless, with a slight socialist realist style. Looking at the artist’s paintings, its emotional detachment and elegant style in execution, one can see parallels between his visual art and his films. Sasnal’s paintings have a cinematic quality that lays in their reduction and spatial structure; the films on the other hand have a material quality what concerns the cinematographic composition of the image and light. The lighting and spartan production design add up to a coherent style, with a camera that always stays on observing distance without every showing empathy for neither characters nor events. The story is stripped down to the evident, taking its horrifying course without revealing any information on the motivations and inner lives of its characters. It is a representation of historically and socially recurring motifs: the repression and brutalisation of a society that functions as an exemplary look through the microscope and leaves further interpretation to the viewer. As much as the intriguing artistic style draws you into the story and makes you stay with it, the non-emphatic depiction of its characters and environment that consist of nothing more than brutality and merciless hopelessness cumulating in a downward spiral and thus generating a depressing and exploiting look on human nature, to which the audience as well as the characters are completely at the mercy. There is no chance of development and last resort for the characters.

by Zsuzsanna Kiràly