By Cornelis Hähnel. It's night. Electronic light shine through the darkness light afterglows on a retina. A person's shadow crosses the dark. A tram. The driver looking concerned in his back view mirror. The depot station in Lodz. The tram driver wanders the empty streets. Pushing a children's bike. A hold-up. A tea in the kitchen. Flashbacks. A staircase. Senses dulled by alcohol. Something has happened. Something has passed into memory.

Its ambivalence is what makes Andzrej Król's BIRTHDAY work. The narrative layers overlap, amend each other, interfuse. A father remembers an event happening exactly one year before the day his five-year-old son was born. The story is told in fragments. Diffuse traces of memory dominate the action. Król intercuts layers to create a narrative rush – the present tense has to face the alcohol-induced images of a past long gone. The viewer needs perseverance to orient himself in this puzzle; a clear classification of all the images seems almost impossible. But this is just what draws you in, what empowers you to go down into these nights and into this film and into this guilt-ridden psyche feverishly trying to reconstruct this fateful night. Just like the protagonist the viewer, too, only gets to see fragments and flashes of what happened back then. The use of shaky images suggesting a subjective closeness together with the sparse light and the disintegration of real time all combined in BIRTHDAY to create a nightmarish interplay of artistic devices, leaving a terrible foreboding. The birthday becomes a day of fate, the past never rests. Like a nocturnal confession the father must once again re-live this night, without any chance of absolution. The past is set in stone.

Links

• BIRTHDAY (D 2008. Andrzej Król)
• The Point of View of a Drunken Man – An interview with Andrzej Król
• The Boom Is On – Cornelis Hähnel about the German film market