THE ROES’ROOM
Festival: Biarritz, Montreal, Mar del Plata, La Rochelle, Buenos Aires, Paris.
Museums: Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art (2000); Palagraziussi Venice (in collaboration with Venice Biennale, 2001); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2002);
Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris (2004).
Starring
Rafał Olbrychski, Elżbieta Mazur, Mieczysław Czepulonis, Agnieszka Wróblewska
Director of Photography
Adam Sikora
Music by
Lech Majewski, Józef Skrzek
Producer
Lech Majewski, Elżbieta Piętak
Writer, Director, Production Designer
Lech Majewski
"A fantastical, haunting tale set in a house where nature fuses with - and eventually consumes - the lives of a family." Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, New York Museum of Modern Art
"A modern visual arts masterpiece!" Ruben Guzman, Curator, Buenos Aires Museum of Fine Arts
"Ravaging intensity!.. In 'The Roe's Room' Majewski has a vision of a kind of paradise or blessedness, though it is fleeting and melancholy, as the natural world invades a comfortable apartment. Grass and trees grow, blood flows from the walls, time passes in a smooth reverie of beautiful music and imagery. The surreal, when it works, defies description. In 'The Roe's Room' it works, with a sense of poetic decency underneath it and none of the coldness or superficial irony of so much video art." Philip Kennicott, The Washington Post
"Fascinating film. Extraordinary imagination." Pierre-Henri Deleau, Biarritz International Festival of Audiovisual Media
"A visionary and musical poem. A profound, subtle and very original movie." Claude Chamberlan, Montreal International Film Festival
"There is a strange, entrancing beauty to the images and music in 'The Roe's Room'. Majewski creates striking visual tableaux that possess a memorable, haunting quality." Brendan Kelly, Variety
"Henri Langlois Association presents two equally unique film masterpieces at Cinema Accatone in Paris: the somber 'Film' by Samuel Beckett, and hypnotic 'Roe's Room' by Lech Majewski." Allan Riou, Le nouvelle Observateur
"Disturbing and visionary." Carlo Montanaro, La Nuova di Venezia
"Majewski's normal multi-tasking takes on even greater dimensions in his absolutely singular 'autobiographical film opera'. Writing (libretto and music), directing and designing this often limpidly beautiful 'cycle of life' parable, he conjures some remarkable images out of an extremely contained spatial and thematic environment…One of a kind." Gareth Evans, Time Out London
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THE ROES’ROOM - AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FILM OPERA
An apartment in an old building. A growing Son, middleaged Mother and Father - a pensioner. The story presents their daily routines in the stretch of a year... This simple description can be misleading since THE ROES'ROOM has multiple meanings.
In the XIXth century opera "emotions sang", in THE ROES'ROOM it is the Son's soul that sings (the voice of countertenor). He is a poet. His sensitivity creates his poetic autobiography.
On a deeper level, juxtaposing the manmade apartment with Nature (grass grows from the floor, a snowstorm comes from the refrigerator), THE ROES'ROOM is a story of the life and death cycle. Nature, the final victor, will devour the walls, tables and shelves: all these clean and even surfaces that man is so proud of.
