- The story of an outstanding Polish painter, Zdzislaw Beksinski, and his complicated relationship with his son, Tomek, an extremely popular music journalist who suffered from depression and made numerous attempts to commit suicide.
- The story of an outstanding Polish painter, Zdzislaw Beksinski, and his complicated relationship with his son, Tomek, an extremely popular music journalist who suffered from depression and made numerous attempts to commit suicide. The film is a startling, sometimes shocking, sometimes moving family drama documentary which has been painstakingly reconstructed using archival footage only - audio recordings, film and photographs from the Beksinskis' private archive, material that has never been made public in this form before. The screenplay is based on Magdalena Grzebalkowska's best-selling biography, "The Beksinskis. A Double Portrait".
In the late nineteen sixties, Zdzislaw Beksinski's fascinating, transgressed art hit the salons. Before long, he became a well-known artist and left his birthplace, the small, provincial town of Sanok in south-east Poland, for the capital, Warsaw. An eccentric, surrounded by mystery and a dark aura, he shunned people. He was reluctant to make public appearances and refusing to give interviews, preferring to work undisturbed in the quiet of his home. His studio was located in his small flat in a Warsaw high-rise. He loved music, cinema and technological innovations of all kinds and shared his enthusiasm with his son. In the nineteen eighties, Tomek took Polish Radio's listeners by storm with a program entitled "The Romantics of Rock Music". Thanks to the phenomenal music and the presenter's charisma, it obtained cult status. The public success of father and son effectively camouflaged the drama playing out between them. The Beksinskis hit the headlines in 1999, when Tomek committed suicide on Christmas Eve. A few years later, Zdzislaw was brutally murdered in his own home. It was then that sensation-seeking journalists began writing about a family curse which had made its presence felt for years in the father's paintings, with their depictions of suffering, disintegration, decay and death, and in the son's depressive broadcasts.
For almost fifty years, Zdzislaw Beksinski documented the altogether prosaic daily life of his immediate family. That documentation took diverse forms; he wrote letters, took photos, kept an audio journal and filmed everyday occurrences. Devoid of even the slightest hint of self-creation, this extremely personal family diary makes a piercingly disquieting impression since what it concerns is of the greatest worth in a documentary film, it is what most interests audiences and appeals to them. It is stepping into intimate, inaccessible territory, into the territory of "that-has-been". It is authentic, something which could never be achieved by any other means whatsoever.
For many years, Zdzislaw's true image and Tomek's, too, for that matter, stood in direct opposition to the widely held notions on that topic. The letters, tapes and filmed material reveal the complex relationships connecting the family. The powerful Zdzislaw, who loved his son in his own way, never raised a hand to him, but he never hugged him, either. He preferred being 'best pals' to being a father. Tomek, hypersensitive and searching for romantic love, was the creator of imaginary, inner worlds which, as they came into collision with reality, collapsed like a house of cards time after time. Disillusioned, disenchanted and despairing, he sought an escape from life in death.
The Beksinskis' tragedy is, above all, a terribly universal and timeless story about the complex relationship between father and son.
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By what name was Beksinscy. Album wideofoniczny (2017) officially released in India in English?
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