Writers: Damian Kocur and Marta Konarzewska
Director: Damian Kocur
Damian Kocur’s debut Bread and Salt was one of the best films of 2023. Austere and puzzling, it charted the homecoming of a piano prodigy going back to a housing estate in Poland where the Arab owners of a new kebab restaurant are victims of racist abuse. With the camera firmly on the young pianist’s face, the actions of the other characters were sometimes hard to work out. Blank screens peppered Kocur’s debut feature.
Here, in his second film, the story is easier to follow, but Kocur’s themes of home and family are still as strong, Under the Volcano, opening the 23rd Kinoteka Polish Film Festival, follows a Ukrainian family holidaying in Tenerife in February 2022. They are just about to leave for Kyiv when the war breaks out; they get as far as the airport but are forced to return to their hotel.
The start of war exacerbates the tensions already existing in the family. The row about a parking space is a recognisable enough scenario for any family forced to spend unnaturally long periods of time together on holiday, but later, we realise that the wife Anastasiia is not the mother of the teenage Sofia and younger child Fedir. She is their stepmother and the relationship between her and Sofia becomes ever more frosty as they have to wait it out on the Spanish island.
They go to the beach, eat in the hotel’s restaurant and attempt to visit Tenerife’s volcano, but Sofia and her father are glued to their phones, checking up on what is happening back in Ukraine. Their fellow holidaymakers hardly make their extended vacation any smoother. Russian tourists laugh and make merry while a group of English boys threaten to beat them up, arguing about another parking space.
Sofia, understatedly played by Sofia Berezovska, seeks refuge from the arguments between her father and stepmother, and goes out walking along the promenade. It is here where she meets David, himself a refugee from Africa with a terrible story to tell about his journey. Kocur lets the viewer make their own connections to the similarities of Sofia and David’s situations. News footage on a bar’s TV shows boats full of people wearing orange life jackets.
Based on an article that Kocur read in the newspaper, Under the Volcano brings the terror of conflict to holiday beaches and carnival parades. Kocur’s lens is objective, cold even, but this adds a layer of realism to the story. The quarrelling and the eventual tears are filmed with the same coolness throughout. Kocur is determined not to make his film melodramatic. The kindness of the hotel manager, almost unseen and right at the start of the film, is one of the few times that this movie ventures towards the emotional.
This cinematic distance is effective, but the strategy also works against the film. The family don’t really discuss what is happening back home, or indeed, what the future holds for them. Instead, we eavesdrop on telephone conversations and have shots of Sofia’s face who always looks as bored, inaccessible and vulnerable as any teenager. However, we know more about her than her father does.
The film’s two endings attempt to insert the sentiment which has otherwise been brewing like lava under the volcano, but neither of them entirely works. Shots of celebration where one person is stranded and distraught seem a little hackneyed now. And yet, the film has to end somewhere, unlike the war that rages on.
Kinoteka Polish Film Festival 2025 takes place in venues across London and the UK 6 March to 25 April. For further information and tickets: https://kinoteka.org.uk/
