Faithbreaker is Piotr Złotorowicz’s incredible piece about truth and family. Tantalizingly mind-bending and beautifully shot, this film will be available to stream on Sunday, June 5 through the 2022 New Jersey International Film Festival.

Złotorowicz throws the viewer right into the story, almost harshly at first.  The film opens at night in a small Polish town, sparks from a welder’s work cutting through the inky darkness. We watch as a group of men prepare to knock down a silo, and we are introduced to two of the main characters: Alek (Alko) and Robert.  Not long after, we are introduced to the other central characters of the film: Ania, Mara, and Francisz.

These five characters are the vessel through which this story is told, and they are all deeply interconnected with one another.  Alek is Francisz’s son and Ania’s childhood sweetheart; Ania is Mara and Robert’s daughter; Robert works for Francisz; Alek and Robert work together on a secret side hustle.  Yet all of these relationships are more complicated than they seem. 

The film is told from each of their points of view, and this broad range of perspective and lived experience compounds into a trippy and deeply disturbing reveal.  Part of the film’s charm is that we never really know if what we’re seeing onscreen is fantasy or reality until the ugly truth is staring you in the eye.  And honestly, ugly an understatement.  The twist at the end of this story is a tough pill to swallow, and it acts as a commentary on selective truth and morality.

Part of what makes this story so effective is that it expertly toes the line between being creepy and disturbing.  The film is filled with unsettling music, dark familial scenarios, and a cast that really leaned into developing the tangled web that is the character world.  Złotorowicz also manipulates lighting in a way that really contributes to the story.  As mentioned earlier, darkness is often interrupted by sparks or flames, but there was one particular flashback that also featured some really effective lighting techniques. 

In this scene, Ania and Alek are shown as schoolchildren.  The young boy is struggling to recall the thing he’s reciting aloud, and the girl is whispering the answers to him.  The scene starts with them in a classroom with their teacher - who is later revealed to be Ania’s mother, Mara - and classmates.  The lights are fairly bright in the classroom at first, with sunlight streaming through the window and very clear visibility of the students’ faces.

As the teacher observes Alek’s recitation, a small dollhouse is shown on her desk.  It is lit from the inside, producing a soft, warm glow from its windows.  As she looks back and forth between Alek and Ania, aware of the secret that turns the film on its head, she gets distracted by the house.  Using her fingers, she pushes open the windows of the house, and in a match on action, the windows of the classroom blow open and reveal a much darker, emptier room.

Now only Mara, Ania, and Alek are in the room, each one of them lit with an overhead light.  The scene feels unsettling, and it becomes even more unsettling when Mara is struggling to open the dollhouse, which no longer has any functioning windows.  She drags it in front of her and opens up the roof, which leads to a real-time, recorded switch of the overhead light from white to blue.  This moment completely changes the trajectory of the film and acts as the first hint that something in this town is not right, and the viewer doesn’t even know it yet. 

And that’s the beauty of this film!  True to its name, Faithbreaker peels back the layers of a surprisingly complex and upsetting reality to make the viewer reconsider their faith in humanity.  Don’t miss your chance to experience the twists and turns, watch Faithbreaker on Sunday, June 5 through the New Jersey International Film Festival.

Faithbreaker screens at the 2022 New Jersey International Film Festival on Sunday, June 5, 2022 – Online for 24 Hours! To buy tickets to see it click here. 

Faithbreaker - Piotr Złotorowicz (Warsaw, Poland)

Ania comes back home after years away to take care of her mother in last months of her life. She left the village as a child and now she comes back as a young adult and meets her childhood love, Alko. To her parents this encounter is an echo of old mistakes. None of them knows that they will have to confront their past. None of them knows that today they are going to forgive. Faithbreaker is a meditation about a moral cost of truth. In Polish, subtitled. 2021; 72 min. 

The 27^th annual Festival will be taking place on select Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays between June 3 -12. The Festival will be a hybrid one as we will be presenting it online as well as doing select in person screenings at Rutgers University. All the films will be available virtually via Video on Demand for 24 hours on their show date. Each ticket or Festival Pass purchased is good for both the virtual and the in person screenings. The in person screenings will be held in Voorhees Hall #105/Rutgers University, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, NJ beginning at either 5PM or 7PM on their show date. 

Tickets: $15=Per Program; Festival All Access Pass=$100.

For more info go here: https://2022newjerseyinternationalfilmfestival.eventive.org/