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Revenge on the White Bourgeois Revenge on the White Bourgeois
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Still from the film “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (Wolfgang Ennenbach Sommerhaus Filmproduktion)
Fiction

Revenge on the White Bourgeois

An Interview with Burhan Qurbani
Jan Pelczar
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time 10 minutes
Jan Pelczar:
A journalist from Radio RAM. Author of the book 'Lecę. Piloci mi to powiedzieli' ('I'm Flying. Pilots Told Me That'). A graduate of the Polish School of Reportage. Associated with 'Przekrój' magazine since forever. In childhood, he flipped through all the editions at his grandparents'. In adulthood, he became addicted to the crossword puzzles of the Kaliber 45 collective and the drawings of Raczkowski.

It’s been 40 years since Rainer Werner Fassbinder adapted Berlin Alexanderplatz for television. It took a lot of time before another film-maker found the courage to tackle this canonical German novel.

Director Burhan Qurbani was born the year that Fassbinder’s series came out. His three-hour-long movie premiered during this year’s Berlin Film Festival. Qurbani’s next project will be an adaptation of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy, this time using the black, red and yellow of the German flag, which symbolize the themes of unity, justice and freedom. Part one will be a musical.

Jan Pelczar: Your adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz is set in the present day. Was it your intention to update it?

Burhan Qurbani: I grew up with this novel. I was 16 or 17 when I first read Berlin Alexanderplatz. I finished high school with it. And I completely failed. I was supposed to become a doctor, but because my high school diploma was not so good, I ended up making movies. That was all because of Berlin Alexanderplatz, really. So I had a certain bitterness towards Döblin’s novel. When I moved to Berlin, I decided to re-read it. At that point, I had already become a writer and I realized how much beauty there is in the novel, how much poetry, how complex the language is. I was able to appreciate it at a much deeper

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Jan Pelczar:
A journalist from Radio RAM. Author of the book 'Lecę. Piloci mi to powiedzieli' ('I'm Flying. Pilots Told Me That'). A graduate of the Polish School of Reportage. Associated with 'Przekrój' magazine since forever. In childhood, he flipped through all the editions at his grandparents'. In adulthood, he became addicted to the crossword puzzles of the Kaliber 45 collective and the drawings of Raczkowski.
Publish date: 06.11.2020

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Bartosz Bielenia. Photo from the film “Corpus Christi”
Opinions

To Give Back Love

An Interview with Bartosz Bielenia
Jan Pelczar
Jan Pelczar:
A journalist from Radio RAM. Author of the book 'Lecę. Piloci mi to powiedzieli' ('I'm Flying. Pilots Told Me That'). A graduate of the Polish School of Reportage. Associated with 'Przekrój' magazine since forever. In childhood, he flipped through all the editions at his grandparents'. In adulthood, he became addicted to the crossword puzzles of the Kaliber 45 collective and the drawings of Raczkowski.

“We can do quite well in suffering; it’s a very comfortable condition,” Bartosz Bielenia says about his role as the character Daniel in Jan Komasa’s film Corpus Christi, Poland’s Oscar candidate. “Plunging into pain, into constant mourning and into never-ending tragedy can give you a lot of pleasure. Daniel tries to shake people out of this condition. He says: ‘Understand and forgive.’ That is – process it, forgive and let it go. He has a mechanism for it,” Bielenia tells Jan Pelczar.

Jan Pelczar: Daniel, the character you play in Corpus Christi, deceives people by pretending to be a priest, but he has inside him an openness that lets him do a lot of good. The audiences confirm it: we’d like to have that kind of priest.

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