"The Mill & the Cross" at Sundance

Młyn i krzyż (The Mill and the Cross), the latest film by Lech Majewski, will have its world premiere at Sundance – the world’s largest independent film festival, taking place in Park City, USA.

The Mill and the Cross will screen in the “New Frontier” section of the festival. “New Frontier” is a selection of five innovative and original works that change the narrative structures of filmmaking. The Mill and the Cross, starring Rutger Hauer, Charlotte Rampling and Michael York, takes place partly inside the Peter Bruegel the Elder’s painting The Way to Calvary of 1564, and mixes modern audiovisual technologies with traditional filmmaking. The film was made as a Polish-Swedish co-production between Silesia Film, TVP, and Bokomotiv Filmproduktion. The Mill and the Cross also received financial backing from the Polish Film Institute.

A documentary by Dagmara Drzazga about the making of The Mill and the Cross received the prestigious Prix Italia in Torino earlier this year. A retrospective of Lech Majewski’s works was shown at this year’s “Two Riverbanks” festival in Kazimierz Dolny.

Last year’s edition of the Sundance film festival featured three Polish films: Wszystko, co kocham (All That I Love) by Jacek Borcuch and two student films of the Łódź Film School: Echo by Magnus von Horn, and Birthday by Jenifer Malmqvist.

Sundance, made famous by its creator Robert Redford, is not just the annual festival, but also the Sundance Institute that supports independent filmmakers from around the world. The Sundance Institute helped launch the careers of such filmmakers as Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, and Jim Jarmusch. Sundance is also a place for filmmaking and screenwriting workshops, a support fund for documentary films, and the Sundance Channel – a television channel broadcasting arthouse and independent cinema, launched in 1996.

The Sundance Film Festival will run from January 20 through January 30, 2011.

Further details about the festival available at: www.sundance.org.

Press release

Translated by Karolina Kołtun