excerpt from our history
5 years of Gliwice's Film Club "Gates" - year 2006
On 25th of may at 6:00 PM in the reading room of Empik a birthday party was held. The birthday party of Gliwice's Film Club "Gates". It was 5 years ago when the club inaugurated its - as it later turned out - fruitful activity. The walls of the reading room were ornamented with a big club banner, newspaper articles and photographies presenting work on the set and at workshops. For those interested there was a large album, in detail showing activity over the years. Behind the projector sat the chairman of the club - Marcin Kondraciuk. The party began with a movie prepared specially for this occasion, showing the whole range of ventures that GFC patroned: fragments of made short films, castings and spectacles of the Theater of New Arts (formed after the fusion with the Youth Culture Movement), field workshops, accounts after attending on film festivals, concerts of "Gates" band, "loud" actions of SEPG (Special Effects Pyrotechnical Group), exhibitions of arts made by members of the club. The next step was the presentation of "shorts" made by filmo-photograpic workshops ("Film view" in 2003 and "The village in the shadow of the city" in 2004/05) partipicants. From movies made by young men and branded with the club logo, the most significant were: "Why" (snapshots presenting the cruelty of war), "Passage" (an example how to make a paranoid situation of merely crossing the street - using interesting montage and music by Kronos Quartet), "A movie about nothing" (a grotesque sequence taking place on the stairs of the "Jazz Club"), Ecce homo (a climatic metaphor about man). How arduous, but also funny often can be an actors work on a off film set, we could see for ourselves while watching doubles of scenes taken from the movie "Interrogations" (the premier show was held at the Literary Club "Pearl"). To finish the presentation the most representative "Gates" movies were shown: "Dusk of the Dawn", "The Look" and "The Evil One". And they were worth coming for. "Dusk of the Dawn" directed by Kondraciuk is a sixteen minute story about solitary, revenge and crime, packed with allegorical shots (the whole review on site - www.experyment.friko.pl/dzialy/publicystyka/7.html). It was aired in cinema "Amok" and at TV Jaworzno and it opened up a serie about independent films. Before the movie an interesting reportage was played. "The Look" - a short black-and-white, philisopical-surrealist film created by Beniamin Szwed. It was awarded a Gold KANewka on the IV Festival of Amatour and Independent Cinema KAN 2003. "The Evil One", again directed by Kondraciuk, is a movie produced with a large number (for an off film) of special effects and trick shots. Its a history on the verge of a horror and fantasy (about a family curse considering each generation) and it has found its way to the official selection of II edition GOFFR. Amongst the guests you could have found the representants of "Silesia Nostra" and "GTW" associations, partipicants of the workshops, members of the club "Gates" and people that have been working with it for years. The special guest of the party was the eminent photographer Jerzy Lewczyński, who praised the actions of the club. As I wish for more succesful years for them, I hope that future activity of Gliwice's Film Club "Gates" will put Gliwice on the cultural map of the country.
