Lech Majewski has been named recipient of this year’s Special Camerimage Directing Award, recognizing his unique cinematic vision as well as his directorial devotion to making his film projects unique visual experiences that transcend geography, human fragility, and time itself.
Among Majewski’s works, one can find a diversity of ideas and themes proving he never stopped looking for new ways of fuelling his artistic curiosity. In 1989’s Prisoner of Rio, a tale about Ronald Biggs, one of the perpetrators of the English Great Train Robbery, he worked with the real-life Biggs and blurred the borders of reality, fiction, and art. In 1992’s Gospel According to Harry, produced together with David Lynch via Propaganda Films, Majewski reused the tried biblical motifs in the scenery of the Californian desert to tell a surreal story of the paradise lost. In 1999’s Wojaczek, screened at dozens of high-profile film festivals, the director took an obscure and tragic, yet incredibly talented Polish poet and made him the subject of an ironic, deadpan cinematic game with the convention of a biopic as well as with the perception of art as such. While in 2000’s Angelus, an intimate epic about 1950s Silesian coalminers living in an occult commune, which was called by many a hallucinating film experience, Majewski has proven his imagination as a storyteller concerned with the people excluded by the mainstream whose lives can still serve as haunting and humbling lessons for the modernity.
Beyond being a film director, Majewski is also an acclaimed painter, a talented composer, a sublime writer, and a poet. His installations were exhibited throughout the world, while the operas and theatre plays he directed evoked a variety of reactions in people from different classes, cultures, races, and religions. His most recent project, Valley of the Gods, with a cast headlined by Josh Hartnett, John Malkovich, Bérénice Marlohe, Keir Dullea and John Rhys-Davies, explores an idiosyncratic and mysterious vision of America and is set to provoke discussion everywhere it is shown, including at a special screening and director’s introduction at the 27th EnergaCamerimage, the festival which runs from Nov. 9-16. Majewski will be presented the Camerimage Directing Award during a special ceremony at the fest.
Local school staple “Lost on a Mountain in Maine” from 1939 hits the big screen nationwide
Most Maine schoolchildren know about the boy lost for more than a week in 1939 after climbing the state's tallest mountain. Now the rest of the U.S. is getting in on the story.
Opening in 650 movie theaters on Friday, "Lost on a Mountain in Maine" tells the harrowing tale of 12-year-old Donn Fendler, who spent nine days on Mount Katahdin and the surrounding wilderness before being rescued. The gripping story of survival commanded the nation's attention in the days before World War II and the boy's grit earned an award from the president.
For decades, Fendler and Joseph B. Egan's book, published the same year as the rescue, has been required reading in many Maine classrooms, like third-grade teacher Kimberly Nielsen's.
"I love that the overarching theme is that Donn never gave up. He just never quits. He goes and goes," said Nielsen, a teacher at Crooked River Elementary School in Casco, who also read the book multiple times with her own kids.
Separated from his hiking group in bad weather atop Mount Katahdin, Fendler used techniques learned as a Boy Scout to survive. He made his way through the woods to the east branch of the Penobscot River, where he was found more than 30 miles (48 kilometers) from where he started. Bruised and cut, starved and without pants or shoes, he survived nine days by eating berries and lost 15 pounds (7 kilograms).
The boy's peril sparked a massive search and was the focus of newspaper headlines and nightly radio broadcasts. Hundreds of volunteers streamed into the region to help.
The movie builds on the children's book, as told by Fendler to Egan, by drawing upon additional interviews and archival footage to reinforce the importance of family, faith and community during difficult times,... Read More