TOYS

REPRESENTED BY KFF

What has a greater impact on a child's development - a room full of expensive toys or perhaps no toys at all? Is a child's imagination stimulated to a greater extent by complex electronic inventions or, rather, a simple radio receiver the child has made on his or her own?

Toys takes a look at the toys and games that shaped the imaginations of today's creative leaders. Just as anywhere else around the world, a typical day for a Polish child revolves around his or her life at home and at school. Recreational time was a period of unbridled ease, unaffected by the poor quality of toys or even the lack thereof. The toys available to Polish children were rather different from the toys lavished upon youngsters in the West. Simple, cheaply made of inferior materials, or perchance a gift from abroad or replica of a western toy produced locally by craftsmen. Quite often these were toys made by the children themselves or a relative. A comb and a few coins, an elastic band, a few bottle caps... Even the metal frame for beating rugs filled in for the monkey bars of the West was a source of recreation, social initiation and learning. It all marks a distinct anthropological link between the phenomenon of today's creative minds and the scarcity of toys growing up.

Child's play is a fundamental need of every civilization, particularly one that's wriggling out of the grasp of an authoritarian regime in an effort to maintain a sense of personal freedom and identity. It is a film about how Polish youngsters of the socialist era discovered independence and liberal thinking with a few twigs and some wire.


FILM REPRESENTED BY KRAKOW FILM FOUNDATION

GENRE:
documentary
COUNTRY:
Poland
RUNNING TIME:
52'
YEAR:
DIRECTING:
Andrzej Wolski
SCRIPT:
Andrzej Wolski
DOP:
Kacper Lisowski, Wojciech Staroń, Andrzej Adamczak
EDITOR:
Piotr Waldemar Zajączkowski
MUSIC:
Teresa Kruczek
PRODUCTION:
Instytut im. Adama Mickiewicza

Andrzej Wolski »

Feature and documentary film director. He resides in France, where he has made around 40 films over three decades for French television, as well as BBC, TVP (Poland) and other stations. His specialty is history films and biography. He co-wrote the screenplay for "Europa, Europa" with Agnieszka Holland, which was nominated for the Oscar in 1991. Among his works is "Culture Monthly" (1985) – codirected with Agnieszka Holland a history of the Literature Institute in Maisons-Laffitte. "KOR" (1988) – a history of the members of the Labour Defence Committee in their own words "Czapski" (1985) – a profile of Józef Czapski codirected with Agnieszka Holland "Emissaires" (1987) – three military couriers share untold facts about their war experiences in London, Washington and New York: Jan Nowak-Jeziorański, Jerzy Lerski and Jan Karski. "Moi, Gombrowicz" (1989) – a series of interviews with Witold Gombrowicz in which he talks about contemporary trends in art, along with his own tastes and phobias. "Jan Lebenstein" (2000) - the diary of a loner "Gombrowicz" (2000) portrait of a writer.