Film Award 2011

  • Film Award 2011

The first Film Award of the Polish Film Institute and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, in co-operation with Andrzej Wajda Master School of Directing, has been awarded to Zbigniew Libera and his project "An Afternoon at the Ozone Bar".

Libera’s project was the most complete in reconciling the qualities of visual arts and contemporary cinema. The formally innovative shape of the film, stemming from the hitherto practice of the artist, was merged in an interesting manner with an intriguing vision of the world, the characters and their story.

“The film is set in an unspecified future, in a world of post-control with billions of nano-cameras penetrating every recess of reality, which have long remained beyond any control. The characters spend their last days suspended in the extreme situation of the ultimate time, which forces them to provide answers to fundamental questions” – as Zbigniew Libera explains.

Currently, Libera is developing the screenplay of his film in the frame of the yearly Feature Programme “Development Lab” at Andrzej Wajda School, in the course of preparations for film production.

Zbigniew Libera is one of the most intriguing and prominent Polish artist. His works – photographs, video films, installations, objects and drawings – are an insightful and intellectually perverse play on the stereotypes of contemporary culture. His disturbing video works from the 1980s (Intimate Rites and Mystical Perseverance, among others) appeared ten years ahead of “body art”. In the mid-1990s, Libera embarked on the series of Correctional Devices – objects that reworked already existing products, items of mass consumption (Universal Penis Expander and Body Master. Play Kit for Children up to the Age of Nine, among others). He also designed modified toys, which unveiled the mechanisms of upbringing, education and cultural training, of which Lego. Concentration Camp came across as the most notorious. It’s then that he was recognised as one of the apostles of the so-called critical art, also in the institutional sense – even with his high-profile artistic career, he still maintains close relations with the independent circles and the off scene. In the recent years, he has been dealing mainly with photography, with a special focus on the nature of press photography, and the way the media shape our visual memory and manipulate the image of history (series of works: Positives and Masters, 2003).