Panic Attack (Atak paniki)
Dir. Paweł Maślona
Poland 2017 / 100 mins
Written by: Paweł Maślona, Bartłomiej Kotschedoff, Aleksandra Pisula
Starring: Artur Żmijewski, Dorota Segda, Nicolas Bro, Magdalena Popławska, Grzegorz Damięcki, Julia Wyszyńska, Aleksandra Pisula, Bartłomiej Kotschedoff, Małgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik
Paweł Maślona’s daring directorial debut is a multi-plot black comedy. The protagonists find themselves in an unenviable situation, although the scale of their problems is very different. A married couple returning from a vacation on a plane unluckily switches their seats. A waiter in a luxury restaurant attends wedding guests and in the back room tries to avoid a disaster in a computer game that is his whole life. A girl pretending to have sex in front of a webcam tries to avoid disgracing herself in front of her nosy girlfriends. An author of detective stories meets her ex hoping that not everything is finished between them. Different stories, different characters, all connected not only by complex cause-and-effect relationships but something much more serious – they are all lonely and misunderstood, playing against the whole world without support in other people. Taking advantage of the genre, Maślona gives an unexpectedly bitter diagnosis of the present times.
Magda Sendecka, curator of the film programme at Stary Theatre