“Heavy Mental” in Gdynia and Ninateka
The full-length debut of Sebastian Buttny “Heavy Mental”, presented as part of the Visions Apart section of the Gdynia Film Festival, will be available at the Ninateka.pl portal of the National Audiovisual Institute (NinA) on Thursday 18 September 2014 at 7.00 p.m. – exactly the same time when the audience will watch it in Gdynia.
“Heavy Mental” (dir. By Sebastian Buttny, 2013) is an unpretentious image of the mood and spirit of the contemporary 30-year-olds living in Poland. With their dilemmas, sense of humour, desires and immersions in the paradoxes of the normal life. The main protagonist – Mariusz, a 30-year-old actor, cannot act – he forgets his lines as soon as he enters the stage. He goes to a psychotherapist and it is a part of his therapy to prepare a monodrama. He searches for balance in the old-fashioned art of Japanese archery and breathing exercises – ineffectively. When his grandfather dies, Mariusz’s situation diametrically changes, due to a proposal by a certain Piotr: a heavy metal fan and a social care worker. The result is an untypical triangle and a journey that unveils the greatest fear of the protagonists: the fear of being ordinary.
Sebasatian Buttny’s film is one of four films presented in the Festival’s debut section “Visions Apart”, created by Michał Oleszczyk, the Artistic Director of the Gdynia Film Festival. The section promotes courageous, experimental cinema bordering on various genres.“
The section includes films that are outstanding in their unconventional shape and that for various reasons could have problems in competing within the main selection but which deserve the attention of the audience. I would like “Visions Apart” to be something of the Cannes’ “Un Certain Regard” kind,” Michał Oleszczyk says of the new section. “I am pleased with the fact of showing Sebastian Buttny’s film in NINATEKA,” Oleszczyk adds. “Thanks to that, the Gdynia Film Festival will be hosted in the whole of Poland for one evening, and the Internet users will be able to meet a very interesting directing talent which, while I watched it, brought me associations with what is currently proposed by the American independent cinema filmmakers.”
The first 2000 people who will visit the Ninateka.pl portal on Thursday 18 September at 7.00 p.m. will have the opportunity to watch the complete film for free. For the first time in the history of the portal and of the Gdynia Film Festival, a simultaneous online screening of a film presented to the Festival audience in Gdynia will be held.
“In film art, I am interested in the new but first and foremost in the own, the individual, the internal-impulse-driven. I am glad that we are doing something for the first time. Heavy Mental is shown in the “Visions Apart” section, which has been created especially for such films which attempt at showing something in their own way, off the beaten track. The on-line screening wonderfully fits in,” Sebastian Buttny, the film’s director, says of the Internet premiere.
“We are glad that the Gdynia Film Festival has joined the film events that go outside with their offer towards the Internet users community, such as big international European or American festivals. Such an initiative as a simultaneous Internet premiere of a film presented in the programme is a brilliant idea for attracting the attention of cinema aficionados with the existence of portals offering legal access to films,” says Kinga Jakubowska, the Chairperson of the Legal Culture Foundation. “NINATEKA plays a huge role among them, dealing especially with the online popularization of the most interesting Polish film, theatre and musical productions. We dream for Gdynia to, just as the Rotterdam Festival, promote the young filmmakers from short-length and independent cinema competitions in the same way. We hope that the Internet premiere of “Heavy Mental” is the first step in that direction.”
The NINATEKA service run by the National Audiovisual Institute is a new cultural place in the net that legally shares audiovisual materials and their contexts. At the Ninateka.pl website, one can find over 3800 audiovisual materials divided into fields and categories. At the one Internet address, there are shared the best theatre performances, classic works of the Polish animation, documents, short films, features, classical and contemporary music concerts, journalistic programmes and many more hard-to-get and often archival materials related to culture. Ninateka.pl is an interdisciplinary medium where the user, thanks to the intuitive navigation and in accordance with their needs, can move around as if it was a great Internet cultural centre. No matter place and time, the user can switch categories as if they moved across theatres, philharmonics, studio cinemas, concert rooms, art galleries or music clubs.
During the last year, NINATEKA presented over 50 week themes and broadcast 11 coverings of the most important cultural events as well as presented in total 54 theatre and music premieres.
More at: www.nina.gov.pl; ninateka.pl
