Viewed at the Eleventh Los Angeles Polish Film Festival, April 2010. The unquestioned highlight of the week was Pawel Borowski's debut feature entitled simply "Zero". This a daisy chain of linked stories, crime, betrayals, accidents and incidents, set in an unnamed big city, something like the French classic "La Ronde" or more recently, Andersen's "Magnolia", but yet off in a direction all of its own that could well start a whole new trend in Polish cinema. Borowski uses bright crystal clear photography to contrastively tell an extremely dark, noirish tale with a lingering rhythm that stops to take a good look at people along the way without slowing down the stream of events -- slow and fast at the same time! There are no glamorous actors in this film and yet they are all grippingly real. The camera work of Arkadius Tomiak announces the arrival of a new Pawel Edelman. To do this film justice would take several pages at least. Suffice it to say that "Zero" is a minor masterpiece that people in Poland will be talking about for a long time to come. Director Borowski says that it was well received but far from a box office hit back home, however it is beginning to draw lots of attention on the film festival circuit where just a few days ago it was declared the best film at the Washington, D.C. film festival. In any case, Bravo Borowski -- and keep up the good work.
Review of Zero
