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*** This review may contain spoilers ***
(from the Tribeca Film Festival screening I attended) The director, Niels Laupert, is ushered down the aisle by a polite smattering of applause. He is tall, blond, and angular, and is clearly more comfortable behind the camera than at the front of a stage. He explains to the sparse crowd that the film, was his graduate thesis at the Munich Film School. That he shot it with almost no money at all, because the school only funds shorts and not feature films. That it was shot in 16 days, and that none of the actors got paid. A no-budget grad school project made in a fort night. How much should we be hoping for? But Seven Days Sunday is, hands-down, the best film I saw at the festival this year. In 1996, two 16-year old boys in a small, tired Polish town got drunk one night and decided, literally on a whim, to kill somebody. So they did. They attacked one pensioner in a train station, and another on the street near one of their homes. Having no motives, but also no means to hide their crimes (nor really any understanding of what they themselves had done), they were both apprehended by the authorities by the next day. They had boasted to friends at a party that they were going to do it beforehand, completely unprovoked and apropos of nothing.The film is dark, minimal, sublime, and haunting. The actors, largely unknowns, play their parts with effective disaffection. The cinematography captures the bleakness of mid-nineties small-town Poland completely. When the lights come up, the director comes to the front of the theatre again. His English is the quaint, grammatically-challenged English of a kid who probably didn't study the language well but has seen every seminal American film in the canon multiple times. He explains that he didn't want to make a Hollywood film, because Hollywood films always need to 'tidy things up', explain everything, make it digestible. But this film gives no easy answers, because there are none. A thoroughly sensible treatment of a thoroughly senseless crime.
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