Competition
Dir. Barbara Sass

To begin with, in reality the events turned out to happen in a much notorious way. The noted filmmaker Barbara Sass intentionally avoided the most chocking circumstances, which had taken place in 2007 in one of the Polish nunneries in the provincial town of Kazimierz Dolny. Anyhow, according to Sass, she did not try to document what happened there, and did not even talk with the nuns who were participants of the events.

A sense of taste and balance didn’t’ allow the helmer to exploit the most scandalous details which would certainly unnerve the viewer - in order to make one come to some more general conclusion. One of the two Polish entries into the Competition of The Moscow International - In the Name of the Devil – tells of the story about a priest, father Franciszek (Mariusz Bonaszewski), a renegade Franciscan monk and a charismatic charmer, who comes into the convent propagating a radically unorthodox conception of faith, calling on the nuns to devote to the Lord not only their souls, but their bodies too.

Foreseeing complications, the new confessor and his staunch assistant – the severe fanatic mother superior (Anna Radwan) barricaded the nunnery and enclosed it with barbed wire, so nobody was able to break through the thick stone walls. The inhabitants of the convent – mostly young and naïve girls, disarmed by religious fanatism, appear victims of mass psychosis. But in any community, whatever insane, always at least one person occurs who can oppose the total madness. The plot revolves around the 20-years old Anna, the girl who is tortured by nightmares from some terrible past. Whereas strongly determined to get rid from her demons,
Anna (Katarzyna Zawadzka) is trying to resist the manipulations of the priest who evidently substitutes himself for the God craving for the girls’ flesh.

Long before the premiere in Poland the film has been much rumoured about as the subversive gesture aimed against the institution of faith. “I myself am a Catholic and I have not done this film against the Church, - the director objects. - It was conceived against people who try to manipulate others so as to realize their goals”. Thus Anna’s revolt stands for mutiny against any kind of concealed and ingenious manipulation experienced by people in our informational society.

Classical narration deceitfully prompts us that we wisely predict the finale. Against all expectations the leader of the Polish ‘female cinema’ brings us to an absolutely unexpected ending telling something nonpresumable about the mysterious woman’s soul.

Nina Tsyrkun