The opening ceremony of TWO RIVERSIDES Festival started like in Hitchcock’s films. Only instead of an earthquake … the electricity went out. (By way of digression, the Polish language often plays tricks because after all, the electricity can go out but it cannot get back.) Then we finally entered the world of cinema, a completely different world. Using Grażyna Torbicka’s words, we could forget that we were sitting in a screening room, that there were hundreds of other people with us, and we could only and exclusively be concentrated on what is on the screen.

Juan José Campanella knows how to attract the audience attention. He knows exactly how. (And the fact that last year his „Secret in Their Eyes” won the Oscar in the Best Foreign Language Film category, beating such masterpieces as Michel Haneke’s „White ribbon”- which will be screened today at our Festival, and Jacques Audiard’s „Prophet”– our opening film last year, is not a surprise.)

The film is about revenge (a husband’s seeking the rapist and murderer of his wife being one of the motifs), about injustice (maybe that’s the reason why most scenes were filmed in a court of law), political systems (the main suspect, sentenced for the murder, is being released because he started supporting the prevailing Peronist regime); it’s a film about writing the history and creating narration- a film in the film, so to speak (the main hero, Benjamin, is a retired criminal court investigator trying to write a novel about this 25-year-old unresolved murder case, the trial and seeking the murderer). It’s a magnificent feature with masterfully played male characters, great music a’la Mozart’s ‘Requiem’ (Federico Jusid) and interesting shots (Félix Monti).

But first of all it’s a film about love and hatred. In the interview for www.dwutygodnik.com, Grażyna Torbicka said that films ‘broaden our knowledge and emotions, the two sides of being’. But love and hatred are the two sides of the cinema world, the two most important antimonies. Who could invent others?

T.C.