Bread and Salt

Original title: Chleb i Sol

Directed by: Damian Kocur

Length: 100 min.

Country: Poland

Year: 2022

Premiere: Venice Film Festival 2022 

Available on Klassiki Online (USA and UK geolocation)

Synopsis: pianist Tymoteusz returns to his home town, where youth life has gathered around a newly opened kebab place.

RATING: 4/5

REVIEW

A traditional polish custom was to welcome with bread and salt. According to an arabic saying when two people are "like bread and salt", they're brothers. This dual meaning drives forth the debut film by Damian Kocur, an adaptation of true events that continuously blends reality and fiction.

Tymoteusz Bies, known polish pianist, portrays a conservatory student who returns to his hometown, where the opening of a kebab place slowly unravels a spiral of violence. Much like the protagonist, the entire cast is non-professional, yet their performances are not the slightest compromised by this factor. Characters tailored on their personalities allowed more genuine  interactions and performances than those of several professionals even at the Venice Film Festival.
The involvement of non actors expanded to the very storyline of the film. Characters and actors blend together, scenes are improvisational, the film becomes a collection of moments, even destructured sometimes, but with a constructed epilogue.

Whatever original structures and meanings Kocur's screenplay originally featured, the final work is enhanced by additional thematic oppositions, by the duality of very distinct fields - society and music, that never really cross actively as subjects of the film.
Instead of suggesting claustrophobia, here the 4:3 aspect ratio suggests distance, as a silent observer that witnesses the events from an external point of view. Chleb i Sol also follows the trend of emerging east european cinema of using few cuts, but differs from other films for the limited occasional close-ups and the livelihood of the in-frame action.

Ultimately, Bread and Salt belongs to the better films from east Europe presented at the Venice Film Festival, and represents a striking debut of a bright career for filmmaker Damian Kocur.

Originally posted on the instagram page on September 14, 2022.