Józefina Gocman - Dicks PSC
Jozefina is in a unique class of cinematographers--a Polish woman on the rise looking to bring a Eastern European perspective to the West. When it comes to color and light, her trademark lies at the intersection of vibrancy and simplicity. When on a project, she works the details to exhaustion. She says preparation is her strongest ally and she never leaves anything to chance.
Jozefina's career has spanned the world--from her early days at Krzysztof Kieślowski Film School to work on feature films, documentaries, music videos, and commercials in Germany, Spain, Columbia, the U.S. and more. She's collaborated with notable artists, such as Oscar-nominated Tomaz Baginski, and she's worked on multiple award-winning projects, such as Kos-Krauze and Krauze's The Birds Are Singing in Kigali (2017), which showed at the Chicago International Film Festival. Her latest project saw her traipsing through the heart of the Mississippi Delta as Director of Photography on the feature film Love Dog (2022), which premiered at Locarno Film Festival winning the Special Mention Award.
Jozefina is now based in New Orleans.
IMDb
Film Polski
FILMOGRAPHY
LOVE DOG
Amidst a global pandemic, John loses his girlfriend to suicide, and moves back to his native Mississippi.
We accompany John on that journey against the backdrop of a society also going through its collective confusion, loss, anger and trauma. The tension-filled air is thick with ghosts from the past that now need to be addressed. John's own process of grief leads him from denial through to self-reckoning. Acceptance- and the hope of peace.
World premiere: 75 Locarno Film Festival 2022
https://www.locarnofestival.ch/LFF/locarno75/program-75/film.html?fid=1289413&l=en&eid=75
For Thomas, it’s all about sport. The young high-jumper sticks to the uncompromising training and dietary regime at a sports camp. We soon learn that this is creating an unhealthy situation – to put it mildly. It’s clear from the start that there’s something very wrong in this boy’s life. Not only does he regularly lock himself away to self-harm, or practise leaving a voice-mail for his absent father – the military-style control exercised by his mother, Margot, is absolutely suffocating. Both for Thomas, and for the viewer.
The latter is thanks in part to the alienating film style used by debut director Leri Matehha. This distinctive stylisation in Thomas der Hochspringer has a tragicomic quality, similar to the films of Roy Andersson, although here the undertone is even more excruciating. We are left with the big question: how high exactly can Thomas jump?
(https://iffr.com/en/2021/films/thomas-der-hochspringer)
Festivals: International premiere - Film Festival Rotterdam, Bright Future section
Time for Love
What would you do for love? Mikołaj barely hesitates before he abandons his lowly job handing out leaflets dressed as a snowball and hops on a train in pursuit of the woman of his dreams (who has just walked by). Once aboard, we’re met with a wryly amusing and sometimes surreal series of loosely connected encounters and incidents, involving such as a pair of lost children, a tyrannical ticket inspector, a man with a child’s coffin, a compartment full of tough nuts and a runaway mouse. Will Mikołaj’s bold hopes meet with the reward they deserve, or does fate have something else in store?
Beautifully lit and shot, Columbian director Miguel J. Vélez’s first feature is a highly theatrical stab at reinventing that tried-and-tested cinema trope – ‘strangers on a train’. And he succeeds. The action is sprightly, the characters likeable, the mood hopeful and the outcome satisfying. Does it all add up to suggest a grand metaphor for the journey of life itself - or is this just a typical train journey on the Polish railway in the week before Christmas? Either way, it’s a highly entertaining ride. Up for classical music!
”…it really excels at visual comedy. From weird old men with baby-sized coffins to random outbreaks of song and dance, the film is a journey quite unlike what you may have experienced before.” - Jamal Knox, Austin Film Festival.
Thomas der Hochspringer
BIRDS ARE SINGING IN KIGALI
In more ways than one, the persistent ache of loss permeates “Birds Are Singing in Kigali,” a broken-surfaced, broken-hearted reflection on the Rwandan genocide that marks a heartfelt swansong for married Polish writer-directors Krzysztof Krauze and Joanna Kos-Krauze. Completed by Kos-Krauze after her husband passed away mid-production in 2014, this obliquely framed story centers on a Polish ornithologist who escapes the carnage with the refugee daughter of a slain colleague in tow, tracing their sometimes clashing attempts to process their respective traumas over the following four years. Semi-experimental in form, and sometimes trickily opaque with regard to its characters’ emotions and motivations, “Kigali” appears to bear a few scars from its tragically interrupted production, but still achieves bittersweet catharsis by its conclusion.
read more: https://variety.com/2017/film/reviews/birds-are-singing-in-kigali-review-1202487547/
SILENCE HEARD LOUD
Anna Konik’s latest film entitled Silence Heard Loud
teaches us the rudiments of how to look and listen.
You only see if you watch diligently, and you only hear
if you listen attentively. The ability to truly listen to
and really see the Other as an individual, to recognize
each of them as a person with a unique history, is
the only chance to cross the invisible barriers of
stereotypes, prejudices and exclusion which hamper the
development of empathy and kindness.
(From the text ‘Let Them Become Part of My Experience’
by Łukasz Kropiowski; art historian, curator of the Contemporary Art
Gallery in Opole.)
DUST
Dust is a study of the way that every human body must go through from the moment of death to the funeral. In Jakub Radej’s film, the consecutive stages of the way (mortuary, morgue, cemetery) are juxtaposed with a bureaucratic approach to the property of the deceased. A detached account of the fate of material objects that belonged to the deceased is presented in an open form, which may also include a question about the meaning of life and a reflection on the loneliness of people who have no one to bid them farewell.
SWEET HOME CZYŻEWO
24 hours of the life of Marcin who returns from the States to his hometown. After several years of "economic" emigration, he intends to open the business of life in Poland.