Directed by: Damian Kocur
Starring: Tymoteusz Bies, Jacek Bies, Nadim Suleiman
Rating: ★★★☆☆
How long Damian Kocur will resist the temptation to cast professional actors in his films? At the moment the Silesian-born newcomer is still ‘Bressonian’ to the core. The Polish director has drawn on memories from the housing projects he had been roaming into during his childhood. It is there that Kocur found the cast of his debut full-length film Chleb i sól (Bread and Salt) that premiered in Venice.
Unless famous, interesting persons can play themselves in a feature film. Kocur chose the Bies brothers, two companions of him, for the leading roles of Bread and Salt. Tymoteusz, the elder, is a talented pianist who won the National Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition, but he is still relatively unknown in his homeland. Jacek, the younger, is undecided in real life as to whether he should follow his brother’s footsteps and become a professional musician.
When Tymoteusz returns to his hometown for a summer break to visit his family, a kebab eatery becomes the meeting point with his childhood group of friends. The young musician secretly befriends one of the Arab workers, but the rest of the pack keeps on provoking the restaurant staff with racist comments and jokes. The racial tension between the locals and foreigners leads to tragic, but maybe foreseeable, consequences.
The storyline, which would be more than perfect for an early Spike Lee film, was inspired to a real life episode. In 2017 anti-Muslim riots broke out in the Polish town of Elk after a Tunisian kebab worker stabbed to death a young Pole after the man stole two drinks from the shop. The film title refers to the concept of bread and salt in different cultural contexts. While in Arab culture it hacks back to the concept of alliance between two individuals (represented in the film by the affinity between Tymoteusz and the kekab worker), in Polish tradition it is a symbol of hospitality — the latter reference is bitterly ironic in Kocur’s movie.
The Polish director juggles with directorial confidence the personal need to denounce the issue of intolerance in provincial Poland and delicate remembrance of his boyhood. Chopin’s compositions, as interpreted by Tymoteusz and Jacek through the flm, offer an interesting counterpoint to a summertime slice of life which never appear to be dull in Kocur’s hands, despite the narrow-mindedness and racial prejudice typical of the small-towners in Silesia region and beyond.
Bread and Salt received the Special Jury Prize its world premiere in the Orizzonti sidebar at Venice International Film Festival.
Film Reviewed by Giuseppe Sedia
Published by Kino Mania on February 28, 2023