Section: Regio: Lower Silesia

BUMERANG

BOOMERANG

Leon Jeannot
Poland, 1966, 83 Min

Poland in the 1960s: even the opening credits of the film are akin to an interrogation aimed at sorting out and understanding the facts. There are statements from the police, passers-by, expert witnesses. The viewer gradually realises that people have died in a car accident. They were young, in love, and almost children.

National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute, Warsaw

When the young West German Kurt arrives in Wrocław in his VW Beetle a mine from the war is being defused. He wants to photograph the house where his parents used to live. Now a Polish master mechanic and his daughter Ewa live there. The young German man and young Polish woman fall in love, even though the horrors of the Second World War are still present all around them. For Ewa's father, who lost part of his family in the war, this love affair is more than just a thorn in the side and the tattooed prisoner number on the forearm of a concentration camp survivor sitting next to Kurt at a party is more than just a reminder of German war crimes. Does a love "to Auschwitz" have a chance at success, or even a reason to exist?

This Nouvelle Vague style post-war drama represents a stocktaking of a historical crime, a whole spectrum of national political sensitivities and stereotypes captured in black and white and, at the same time, an exciting and fresh love story which, like no other film of the time, provided a nuanced reflection on post-war German-Polish relations. Wrocław's German past is openly addressed, as a cosmopolitan West German evolves into an identification figure who gets caught up in the emotional wheels of history. KM

Filmformat
35mm | s/w / b/w
Drehbuch
Jerzy Janicki, Leon Jeannot
Kamera
Tadeusz Wiezan
Ton
Bohdan Bieńkowski
Schnitt
Krystyna Komosińska
Ausstattung
Adam T. Nowakowski
Musik
Wojciech Kilar
Darsteller
Barbara Brylska, Holger Mahlich, Pawel Galia, Rudolf Ulrich, Jörg Knoche
Produzent
Marceli Nowak
Produktion
ZRF "Studio", Wroclaw / Filmstudio Wroclaw, 1966
Kontakt
Deutsche Kinemathek - Museum für Film und Fernsehen
DEFA-Filmverleih
Mirko Wiermann
Potsdamer Str. 2
10785 Berlin
Germany
+49 30 30 09 03 63 4
www.deutsche-kinemathek.de
defa-filmverleih@deutsche-kinemathek.de

Leon Jeannot - born in 1908 in Warsaw, died 1997 in Warsaw, Poland. Director and scriptwriter. He studied chemistry in Warsaw. In the interwar period he worked as an assistant director and documentary filmmaker. After the outbreak of the Second World War he fled to the USSR. In 1957 he returned to Poland.

Movies
FREYLIKHE KABTSONIM (1937)
KRYPTONIM NEKTAR (1963)
CZŁOWIEK Z M-3 (1968)
ZAWIŁOŚCI UCZUĆ (1976)