Stanislaw Lem
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Cannes 2013: Five Questions with The Congress Director Ari Folman
It’s been five years since Ari Folman came out with the Academy Award-nominated Waltz with Bashir, an animated personal combat story. He’s back with an incredibly ambitious project, The Congress, that blends real life with fantasy in an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s celebrated book. The movie opens with actress Robin Wright being scolded by her agent, played by Harvey Keitel, for all the poor choices she’s made throughout her career. Faced with a sick child and no job prospects, she meets with Jeff, the studio head of Miramount, a daunting figure played impeccably by Danny Huston. Jeff is sick of […]
by Ariston Anderson on May 28, 2013 -
THE 2011 KRAKOW FILM FESTIVAL
One of the oldest festivals in Europe, the Krakow Film Festival has a reputation among cinephiles as one of the continent’s most prestigious venues for short filmmaking and one of Eastern Europe’s largest markets for documentaries. Its 51st edition, which came to a close Memorial Day weekend, largely lived up to the hype. Unspooling 87 films of various shapes and sizes during the final week of May, it devoted a significant amount of its program to Polish cinema, with a competition section devoted solely to Polish films regardless or length or type. The shorts programming seems to be the heart […]
by Brandon Harris on Jun 13, 2011 -
LEM PODCAST
A few posts below I noted the death of Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. Benjamin Walker has just posted a podcast devoted to Lem and his work.
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 6, 2006 -
STANISLAW LEM, 1921 – 2006
One of my favorite science fiction writers, Stanislaw Lem, died yesterday of a heart ailment. The Polish writer’s work incorporated everything from Kafkaesque humor to political allegory to phiosophical inquiry in novels such as The Futurological Congress, Cyberiad, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub and Solaris, the latter of which was made into films by Andrei Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh. (All of the above are highly recommended.) Those who feel they’ve gotten their Lem through one of the two filmed versions of Solaris should pick up the late author’s novel, which is much less a romantic fable and much more a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 28, 2006
