Watch A Tale of Adam Mickiewicz's 'Forefathers' Eve' For Free
A Tale of Adam Mickiewicz's 'Forefathers' Eve'
On the eve of the Day of the Dead, among mysterious old rituals of the Vilnius region, ghosts of the past and present start to appear.
| Release : | 1989 |
| Rating : | 6.8 |
| Studio : | Studio Filmowe Perspektywa, |
| Crew : | Assistant Production Design, Assistant Production Design, |
| Cast : | Gustaw Holoubek Jolanta Piętek-Górecka Artur Żmijewski Teresa Budzisz-Krzyżanowska Maja Komorowska |
| Genre : | Drama History |
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Reviews
Absolutely Brilliant!
what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.
Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.
There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.
"A Tale of Adam Mickiewicz's 'Forefathers' Eve'", aka "Lava", is an adaptation of the verse drama "Forefathers' Eve" ("Dziady"), which apparently considered one of the most important works in Polish literature. Unfortunately, since I have not read the work, understanding the movie (let alone reviewing it) is extremely difficult.The plot, as near as I could decipher it, is about the ghost of a revolutionary who is called back to life during a magical ceremony held in a cemetery back in the 19th century.. At first he tries to find out what happened to the woman he was in love with, but he quickly starts to relive his memories of the imprisonment of him and his fellow revolutionaries.The play apparently is made up of four completely different parts and the movie seems to jump back and forth between those parts. The movie also makes lots of jumps through time (sometimes even to the present day). The characters speak in verse through much of the movie, sometimes directly to the camera. Demons and ghosts wander through the scenes, and sometimes the lead character disappears for long stretches of time.It's a chaotic mess but I'm not sorry I saw it. The movie weaves a hypnotic spell and that sweeps you up. The movie will probably be best enjoyed by people familiar with the source work, or at least those who speak Polish. (The subtitles on the print I saw were very good, but I'm sure there were a lot of nuances that got lost in translation.) Worth watching if you're feeling adventurous, but multiple screenings are probably necessary to even begin to understand it.
