Lublin Film Festival, which starts on Friday, is not only about screenings and workshops. There is also time to talk with the festival guests. Artists can talk about their work in front of the camera in a space created in the Centre for Culture in Lublin.
The first interviewee was the director Andrei Kutsila. He arrived in Lublin from Belarus with his latest film “Holy Water”. The 19-minute film could be seen during Friday’s screenings titled Ukraine: Documentary, which is a documentary look at contemporary Ukraine and its citizens.
Andrzej Rusin, the program director of LFF, asked the director, among other things, why he decided to use color correction, as “Holy Water” is a visually sophisticated film with subdued colors.
– To focus on people’s faces, not to look at the colors of clothes, or anything else. To turn the attention only on conversations and faces – explained Andrei Kutsila, who also admitted that he tried black and white, as well as sepia film photos to find out what works best.
His film tells the story of the Baptism of Christ holiday on January 19th in Kiev, in one of the districts where an ice hole was cut in a nearby lake. The main ritual of the Orthodox holiday is an icy water bath blessed by a priest. A few weeks later, the war broke out.
Conversations recorded during the 2023 LFF will be successively made available by the organizers.
Photo: GM
This year’s first festival guest had no doubt that films should be watched in the cinema, and not at home (in the photo from the left: Andrzej Rusin, Andrei Kutsila and Daniel Drozd)