“Four Nights with Anna” explores the amour fou of a crematory worker. Leon falls in love with a nurse and obsessively tries to get close to her. He ends up drugging her with sleeping pills and sneaking into her room through the window. He spends long hours by the side of the sleeping woman, getting more and more bold with each visit.
The
world premiere of "Four Nights with Anna" opened the 40th edition of
Quinzaine des Réalisateurs (Directors' Fortnight) during 2008
Cannes Film Festival on May 15th.
Directed by JERZY SKOLIMOWSKI
Produced by PAULO BRANCO and JERZY SKOLIMOWSKI
Starring ARTUR STERANKO, KINGA PREIS, JERZY FEDOROWICZ, REDBAD KLIJNSTRA
Screenplay by EWA PIASKOWSKA and JERZY SKOLIMOWSKI
Director of Photography ADAM SIKORA
Original Music MICHAŁ LORENC
Sound FREDERIC DE RAVIGNAN, PHILIPPE LAULIAC, GERARD ROUSSEAU
Production Design MAREK ZAWIERUCHA
Costumes JOANNA KACZYŃSKA
Edited by CEZARY GRZESIUK
Executive Producers EWA PIASKOWSKA and PHILIPPE REY
Production Managers ANDRZEJ STEMPOWSKI and ANNE MATTATIA
International Sales ELLE DRIVER
“Four Nights with Anna” is an intimate film. It
deals with an intimate, off-center subject – a man sneaking into a
woman’s room at night while she’s asleep. The stylistic approach to
this subject is intimate as well: attention to detail, study of
psychological motives lurking behind human behavior, focus on the
simple aspects of everyday existence. Basic, honest, nuanced and spare. The
intent was to render full credibility to a seemingly outlandish story.
To explore the rational in what on the surface would appear irrational,
or perhaps even psychotic.
The story represents a basic need
for contact with another human being, all the more desperate in a
society that seems to be building more and more barriers between
people. And the courage, sometimes verging on “insanity”, required to
bring them down. It is an eccentric story, unsettling, yet genuinely
romantic. Told with enough distance to allow for irony and humor in the
human drama.
The tone of the film is nuanced, discrete and
without affectation – stark, Polish reality treated with a naturalistic
yet poetic approach. The structure is elliptical, with many subtle
variations, and favors the suggestive over the explanatory.