DRAMA/ROAD MOVIE

SEX LIFE OF SAVAGES

Where you have cannibals, you’re running a risk that someone takes out someone else’s heart.

LOGLINE: A brilliant but emotionally immature Polish-British anthropologist, troubled by his own sexual proclivities, travels to New Guinea to research the rules of sexual attraction among the natives. Accompanied by his orgiastic, yet grief-ridden artist friend, before making a breakthrough discovery he must first overcome the “savage” in himself and in his own culture.

SYNOPSIS: It is 1914. As the world readies for war, a rising star of anthropology, BRONIO (BRONISŁAW MALINOWSKI,31), bothered by recurring erotic fantasies involving his mother, sets out on an expedition to study the natives of New Guinea to see if Freud’s theory of the Oedipal complex is truly universal. He is accompanied by his childhood friend, STAS (WITKACY, 30), a scandalizing painter and playwright with a taste for free love and psychedelic experiences. Along the way they glimpse into the heart of tropical madness, testing the limits of their friendship and loyalty to their ideals and to each other.

SCREENWRITER/DIRECTOR: Marzena Grzegorczyk

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Anka Malatynska

https://www.ankavision.com/

RUNNING TIME: 90 min.

GENRE: drama/road movie

STATUS: in development

SCREENPLAY RECOGNITION:

  • Semifinalist Academy Nicholl Fellowship (top 2%; 100 out of 5050 submissions) (http://www.oscars.org/nicholl/index.html)
  • Quarter finalist, American Screenwriters Association
  • Polish Institute of Cinema screenwriting grant; rating: exceptional
  • Audience Award, INTERSCENARIO Screenwriters Festival, Wrocław, Poland

 

This is a film about passion, in its different forms:  for a human being, for science, for art, and for life itself. It starts with passion (in a bordello) and ends in compassion (on Kiriwina, the Island of Love). It is a provocation, both emotional and intellectual. We follow two men on a journey.  BRONIO and STAS, like most of us, are determined to try to understand what life is about:  STAS through writing and art, and BRONIO, an anthropologist, by studying New Guineans and Trobriand Islanders, societies as far removed as possible from the one he grew up in. The two childhood friends complement each other the way “red complements green.” They share everything: books, a woman or two, the heroism of everydayness and, above all, love of freedom.

With a love triangle in the background, their uneasy friendship and mutual fascination undergoes several permutations. They go through the most shocking, mysterious and solitary moments in their lives. They keep testing the frontiers to which they can push themselves in their grief, in their love, in their discoveries, in their fascinations and different life endeavors.  Will they kill each other or deepen their friendship?

 

                                                                                                                -MARZENA GRZEGORCZYK