When the coronavirus pandemic arrived in Poland earlier this year, producer Jakub Razowski, of Watchout Studio , was already prepping a summer shoot for “Prime Time,” a thriller starring Bartosz Bielenia, fresh off his breakout role inRazowski and first-time director Jakub Piątek had cast from a deep pool of veteran stage actors, whose availability was limited to the summer months when Polish theaters traditionally go dark.
“Any break costs money, and any break causes a domino effect if you stop one production,” says Oscar-winning producer Ewa Puszczyńska , who had to postpone production on “The Zone of Interest,” Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust drama. Principal shooting on the film, which is being co-produced and distributed in the U.S. by A24, has been pushed back until next year.
“You can’t stop living,” Puszczyńska says. “Nobody’s going to give us back this year. I think that we have to be very careful, but still go on working within the limits … and all the difficulties that’s been imposed on us.” The industry is soldiering on.
Polish broadcaster TVN Discovery, meanwhile, will launch international sales on Jan Holoubek’s “25 Years of Innocence,” a pulled-from-the-headlines drama about a man who served 18 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. The film has been a breakaway hit in Poland, where it’s racked up more than 650,000 admissions in the midst of the pandemic.