Crash + lecture

The return of the cult thriller to celebrate the 30th anniversary of its release.

We invite you to the show preceded by a lecture, which will be given by Prof. Agnieszka Nieracka.

Forget about the brakes. David Cronenberg's disturbing cult thriller returns to theaters for its 30th anniversary in a restored 4K version.

The 90s, a modern city with highway ropes and thousands of cars on the streets. Film producer James Ballard (James Spader) one day inadvertently causes a car accident and meets Helen (Holly Hunter), whose husband dies on the spot. The couple starts a romance with each other. While recovering at the hospital, James meets Vaughan (Elias Koteas), a passionate about dangerous collisions, who recreates legendary crashes from the past, including the fatal accident of James Dean. The characters share a fascination with danger and death, immersing themselves in an underground culture where the line between man, body and technology is blurred.

Cronenberg's groundbreaking, controversial work at the time of its premiere received the Special Jury Prize at Cannes “for courage, bravery and originality”. The Canadian master offered a shocking story about adrenaline-chasing, alienated from everyday life characters, who are excited only by risk, and desire becomes for them a path to self-destruction. The cool, metallic, stylized adaptation of J.G. Ballard's novel is a vision that goes under the skin — and deep in our minds — of modernity, in which we need extreme stimuli to feel anything.

Crash, one of the most important cinematic events of the 1990s, is a relentless source of inspiration for films colliding technology with human tissue and futuristic speculation with the weight of matter, led by Julia Ducournau's Golden Palm Titane. There is no need to fasten your seatbelts - frontal collision guaranteed.

About the speaker:

Agnieszka Nieracka — an outstanding expert in the field of genre cinema, author of the book “Science fiction as a film genre”. Cultural scholar, she specializes in the issues of corporeality in cinema and popular culture. She has taught at many universities in Poland, but for the longest time she has been associated with the University of Silesia.