Plac zabaw / Playground
Polish director Bartosz M Kowalski surveys violently wayward youth in his debut feature, premiering in the Official Competition of the long-running festival.
The eponymous location is most definitely of the devil's variety in Bartosz M Kowalski's cumulatively harrowing Polish ordeal-by-cinema Playground (Plac zbaw). Adopting the by-now familiar template of Gus Van Sant's Elephant to fictionalize the murder of 3-year-old James Bulger at the hands of two 10-year-old boys in 1993 Liverpool, it's a necessarily unpleasant and ultimately horrible experience which will certainly leave no viewer indifferent.
A calculatingly steely descent into real-life horror.
Animated version of a poster.
