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This article first appeared in If Magazine issue #150

Producer Lizzette Atkins justifies the theatrical nature of Aim High In Creation! on several levels: the scale and scope of the ideas; its experimental style; the broad interest in the closed society of North Korea; and director Anna Broinowski.s cinematic eye.

.And Anna has proven she can sustain a story for 90 minutes,. says Atkins, referring to the bold Forbidden Lie$..

If the various threads can be woven neatly together, this intriguing project could be a pearler. Cinematic propaganda is the key theme and the film follows Broinowski as she travels to North Korea to meet with that industry.s leading lights and examine former leader Kim Jong-il.s passion for cinema and the filmmaking manifesto he published. Back in Australia, applying the advice she got on a script she took with her, Broinowski makes a short about a community overcoming gas frackers . after all,...

The Jerzy Skolimowski retrospective currently touring the United States is re-introducing American audiences to one of the most free-spirited directors the movies have ever produced. His first features, made in Poland in his mid-twenties, presented an exuberant sensibility shaped by both jazz and poetry; more than 40 years old, they still feel more youthful than most contemporary films. Skolimowski’s fourth feature, Hands Up (1967), was too free-spirited for Communist Poland, as State authorities banned the movie and pressured Skolimowski to leave the country. Working as a nomadic director, he produced an unpredictable but often inspired run of films, though the frustrations of making movies led him increasingly to take solace in painting. At 73, Skolimowski seems to have reconciled the great dilemmas of his life: He returned to Poland in 2008, and he seems to have struck a balance between painting and filmmaking. Last week, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky and I called Skolimowski in Poland to discuss his two careers,...

Skolimowski at work, from the December 1968 issue of Films and Filming,

via chained and perfumed.

Jerzy Skolimowski's comeback as a director after a break of nearly two decades threw many for a loop. The year was 2008, the venue was Cannes and the film was Four Nights with Anna. "Wait, what is this, exactly?" asked Daniel Kasman here in The Notebook. The answer Patrick Z McGavin settled on: "a small but crucial movie," and Skolimowski would follow it up with Essential Killing, which provoked far more resolute reactions, both positive and negative, when it premiered last fall in Venice.

Last month, Deep End (1970) emerged from legal limbo and, restored, it's currently touring the UK and sees a release on DVD in July. Now the full-blown retrospective The Cinema of Jerzy Skolimowski is on at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York through July 3 and, in Los Angeles, Cinefamily...

With the voyeuristic Four Nights with Anna and the visceral, brutal, beautiful and nearly wordless Essential Killing, Jerzy Skolimowski can be said to have made a comeback, but since when has he been away? Philip French in The Observer seemed confident of his authority when he suggested that Skolimowski had done "little of interest since the excellent Moonlighting in 1982." David Thomson in The Guardian called Torrents of Spring (1989), the director's last-but-one film before his seventeen years away from film directing, "a dull version of Turgenev."

Well, I liked it. It gives me no pride to break with critical tradition and admit I haven't read the book, but allowing for some unconvincing accents and dubbing (hardly anybody in this French-British-Italian co-production plays their own nationality), and a spot of rubbery old age make-up, I found it dazzling to the eye and rather enchantingly mysterious, perhaps due to elisions in the adaptation,...