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The Harriman Institute is pleased to sponsor First Look 20/21, the Museum of the Moving Image’s acclaimed festival of innovative new international cinema. Join us for the U.S. festival premier of Bird Talk (2019). This screening is co-presented with the Polish Cultural Institute New York.
Dir. Xawery Żuławski. Poland. 2019, 138 mins. DCP. In Polish with English subtitles. With Sebastian Fabijański, Eryk Kulm Jr., Jaśmina Polak, Sebastian Pawlak, Żaneta Palica, Andrzej Chyra, Marta Żmuda Trzebiatowska, Borys Szyc, Daniel Olbrychski, Katarzyna Chojnacka.
Working from an unrealized script by his father, the late master Andrzej Żuławski, award-winning Polish filmmaker Xawery Żuławski unleashes a wild, urgent, friskily entertaining explosion of cinema. In a society increasingly leaning towards conformity, faith, and reactionary politics, Żuławski’s characters operate on the fringes: a history teacher who’s a stickler for inconvenient facts, another teacher whose sense of justice gets him fired for physically confronting a student, a cleaning lady, a florist, a composer suffering from leprosy, and an aspiring student filmmaker. Frenetic, referential, unapologetically verbose, stylistically elastic, and spilling into hybrid nonfiction in sometimes shocking ways, Bird Talk has a headlong, anarchic spirit that honors the elder Żuławski’s legacy while also feeling entirely of the moment. With cinematography by longtime Andrzej Żuławski collaborator Andrzej J. Jaroszewicz (Possession, On the Silver Globe).
Tickets: $15 / $11 seniors & students / $9 youth (ages 3–17) / $7 MoMI members. Order online. After your purchase (limit 4 tickets per order), an electronic ticket will be sent via email to facilitate contactless check-in; seating will be assigned upon arrival on a first-come, first-seated basis. Learn more here.
