Corrie Film Club

The next film showing at Corrie Film Club, on Sunday September 10th in Corrie and Sannox Village Hall, is The Cold War (Poland. 2018. Pawlikowski. Cert 15), start 7.30pm.

In the ruins of post war Poland two young musicians fall deeply in love. They dream of escaping to the creative freedom of the west but one day as they spot their chance of escape they make a split decision which will mark their loves for ever.

In a review in 2018 in The Guardian, Mark Kermode writes:

Paweł Pawlikowski won the best director award at Cannes in May for this sweepingly intimate love story about a star-crossed couple falling together and apart, through the iron curtain of postwar Europe.

We open in rural Poland, 1949, where Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and Irena (Agata Kulesza) are recording folk songs – mournful tales of love, drink and hardship, raw and elemental. Under the banner of the “Mazurek ensemble” (inspired by the real-life Mazowsze troupe), they audition musicians and dancers to showcase the authentic sounds of Poland, ensuring that “No more will the art of the people go to waste!”

Into these auditions comes Zula (Joanna Kulig), an enigmatic young woman posing as a village girl who significantly performs not a Polish mountain tune but a song learned from a Russian movie. Irena detects “a bit of a con” but Wiktor is smitten by Zula …Soon Zula is one of the stars of Mazurek, unfazed by the authorities’ co-opting demands that they sing the praises of Stalin and agricultural reform. When Wiktor spies a chance to defect during a 1952 engagement in East Berlin, he begs Zula to come with him. But are her pragmatic priorities in sync with his western-leaning dreams?