IN FULL GALLOP

English Title: IN FULL GALLOP

Poland's premier filmmaker, Krzysztof Zanussi, earned a reputation as a smart, subversive critic of his country's totalitarian regime. Now in these more liberated times, he has chosen to look back on the worst days of that regime with a witty comedy that has clear autobiographical origins. Because of his absent father's political past, ten-year-old Hubert suffers the wrath of local officials, forcing his mother to send him off to a so-called aunt in Warsaw. Aunt Ida is a mysterious figure whose ingenious duplicities allow her to survive the system. Eccentric, daring, and delightful, the middle-aged Ida refuses to give up her passion for horses, now considered a remnant of bourgeois culture, and insists on taking all sorts of wild risks – including theft, trespassing, and various forms of “bending the truth” – in order to live life to its fullest. A moving portrait of life in a Stalinist state and a child's pressures to conform, IN FULL GALLOP is above all a loving and humorous celebration of resistance in its smallest forms, and a wry lesson in the slippery, elusive nature of truth. (In Polish with English subtitles) – I. Leimbacher, Mill Valley Film Festival