Monument + Q&A with dir. Jagoda Szelc

A group of hotel interns wake up in an ice-cold van. They don’t know each other yet, and have just arrived to do their internships. The strict manager of the hotel numbers the students: real names are not relevant, and there is no place for individuality here. As the group move through green-lit corridors and empty rooms while performing the tasks allocated to them, time becomes increasingly diffuse and the atmosphere increasingly eerie. What exactly is going on here?

With her award-winning debut film Tower: A Bright Day – which also made clever use of genre elements – Polish filmmaker Jagoda Szelc made it clear she is more interested in questions than in answers. In Monument, she uses the same ambiguous approach, once again resulting in an enigmatic film. An artistic psychological thriller in which it’s not necessary for all the pieces of the puzzle to fall into place. The impressive acting also deserves a mention – particularly as the cast is made up largely of drama students.

Jagoda Szelc was born in Wrocław, Poland, in 1984. From 2002 to 2006, she studied at the Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław. She later became a scholar of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Between 2009 and 2015, Jagoda studied at the Directing Department at the Polish National Film, TV and Theatre School in Łódź, Poland. Her films have screened at festivals such as Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, IDFA, Nowe Horyzonty, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and the Brooklyn Film Festival. Her short film “Such a Landscape” won the Golden Tadpole Award at the Camerimage Festival in 2013. Wieża Jasny dzień // Tower A bright day was her feature debut that won the Best Debut Film and the Best Screenplay Awards at the 42nd Gdynia Film Festival.

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