The Giant’s Return

The road to the Giant, a boarding house in a remote area, leads through a dark, sinister-looking forest. Submerged in a wintry landscape, the Giant conceals empty interiors, creaking staircases, and open windows-the only sign of spring is in a Botticelli painting. When an anonymous man arrives, played by Sławomir Żukowski (he worked with Adam Sikora earlier in the films Ewa and Bruno Schulz), he finds that there is also a woman living there (Barbara Lubos-Święs). Both characters have had a difficult life-will they manage to find a way to understand each another? This will not be easy, as they are both-like the land they are in-hiding a secret. Sikora filmed his dreamlike film in the villages and wilderness around the Polish-Czech border during his workshops at the Radio and Television Faculty of the Silesian University in Katowice. In Return of the Giant, whose structure is free of the constraints of classical narration, meaning emerges slowly from images and sounds, exposing the inner landscape of a protagonist trapped in the past and in his own thoughts. (New Horizons International Film Festival)