"I took a walk one day into a neighbourhood that most people would avoid. I went back with a camera and made a film. It's a story about me. you, and them. It's a story about all of us. It's a story you cannot avoid." —
Lech Kowalski.



Rock Soup is a lyrical, hard-edged, tactful look at the struggles of a homeless community in New York’s Lower East Side. The film covers the spring of 1988 at Tompkin’s Square Park’s Rainbow Soup Kitchen and a subsequent public hearing concerning a housing project for the elderly the city and developers want to build in the "vacant" lot where the kitchen survives. Quotidian moments of engagement (1 don’t see my situation as hopeless...I have skills. This is just the low point of my life") mix with the gritty
day-to-day commitment of the kitchen’s workers, supporters and customers, climaxing at the hearing where the homeless and the local residents are pitted against one another as the developers and city planners listen with barely masked disinterest.
Shooting in stunning black and white and accompanied by saxophonist Chico Freeman's jazzy score (recorded in the park), director Lech Kowalski has created an aesthetically moving, politically articulate document. Rock Soup is a testament to a thriving community realized through the ancient tradition of the soup kitchen, and the searing, ongoing oppression of the "temporary" as a condition of what it is to live homeless and disenfranchised in contemporary urban America. Today in that location there is no kitchen or housing, but there are many more vacant lots filled with hungry people.—

9,95 €

In a factory bunker on the outskirts of Krakow, a group of punk outsiders live by their own rules, bobbing their heads to the sound of their favorite bands while hand stitching leather boots labeled “hand stitched in Poland”.

The crisp charcoal like images are framed and edited to vibrate along with the punk rock music that fills the workspace during the day and fuels the parties at night. This very unique boot factory shows that rock and roll can still represent real resistance. The camera moves discreetly always immersed in the events.
Extreme close-ups of the leather and of the scars on the flesh are tactile, tangible and touchable.
Cult director Kowalski reveals the simmering tension in the bootmaker’s lives and the releases they find in their work and music.
The images confront us directly, sometimes pushing us to the edge. The sounds are inclusive, the music intrusive, scenes gather speed and tumble forward. Nevertheless the apparent spontaneity of the pictures conceals a real mastery of cinematic techniques.
The camera follows their lives first showing the mythical aspect of the enterprise but then a harsher reality.

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" In this strong and important film we are the farmers. We question along with them. We live their fight as if it is our own." Liberation (french newspaper)

One day the people who live in a small village located in far eastern Poland near the Ukrainian border, an ecologically pristine agricultural area called the lungs of Poland discover that Chevron, the world's fourth largest energy corporation plans to build a shale gas well in their village.

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