Andrzej Wajda’s Sweet Rush (Polish title: Tatarak) has won the Alfred Bauer Award at the 59th International Film Festival in Berlin.

Named after the founder of the Berlinale, the award is given to directors who chart new horizons in cinema.

Eighty three year-old Wajda told a press conference that he never thought an old filmmaker can be recognized as someone who charts new horizons. In his view, a blend of feature film and documentary is the cinema’s future. He also recalled that at the start of his career, he deeply believed that the cinema could play a social and political role. ‘It seems to me this is what we’ll be witnessing again’, he said.

Sweet Rush is an intimate, psychological film based on a short story by the famous Polish writer Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz (1894-1980), with some elements from a story by the Hungarian writer Sándor Mároi. It stars Poland’s top actress Krystyna Janda as Marta, a middle-aged woman, the wife of an ageing doctor whose life is turned upside down when she meets a young man, Bogus.

In the film, Wajda confronts fiction with reality, intertwining the fictitious story with heart-rending monologues from Janda about the death of her real-life husband, the acclaimed cinematographer Edward Klosinski, to whom the film is dedicated. On the one hand we see the actress reconstructing the last months of her husband's life in a simple but extremely touching way and, on the other, we follow the struggles of her fictitious character, who cannot get over the death of the man with whom she was so happy.

A critic for Frakfurter Rundshau, Daniel Kothenschulte, described Wajda’s film as ‘the diamond in the ashes of this year’s Berlinale’, a reference to the director’s feature Ashes and Diamonds, which skyrocketed him to stardom five decades ago. Sweet Rush, he wrote, is yet another genuinely personal film from Wajda, a minimalist work of a truly poetical power.’

T

he daily Tagesspiegel called the film ‘a moving meditation about death; an almost suicidally courageous work.’ (mk/pg)