director Wojciech Marczewski
screenplay Wojciech Marczewski
director of photography Jerzy Zieliński
music Andrzej Trzaskowski
with Tomasz Hudziec, Teresa Marczewska, Marek Kondrat, Zdzisław Wardejn, Władysław Kowalski, Teresa Sawicka, Jerzy Bińczycki
awards
Silver Bear, FIPRESCI prize and OCIC – prize awarded by the International Catholic Film Organization and prize of the International Association of Film Clubs at International Film Festival in West Berlin, 1982
Main Award, Silver Lions (together with the films ‘In Broad Daylight’ and ‘Shilly- Shally’), Honorary Commendations for Irena Choryńska (together with her editing in the film ‘Voices’) at the 8th Polish Film Festival in Gdańsk, 1981
prize awarded by the Polish Association of Film Critics Club, the Don Quixote, 1983
[DIALOGUE FROM THE FILM]
Tomek: I have exposed some provocateurs. They were supposed to be scouts and friends and yet they turned out to be enemies. Father: You’ve grown… Tomek: You’re not pleased. Father: I am… Why don’t you come back home with me? Tomek: Now when we get so important tasks? Counter-revolution is under way, the press has betrayed us – we had to forbid reading newspapers – and you want me to go back home?
RAFAŁ MARSZAŁEK, A FOSTER FAMILY [RODZINA ZASTĘPCZA], ‘KULTURA’, 1981, NO. 48
The hero of ‘The Shivers’ is a young boy selected as an object of charitable indoctrination, deprived of his intimacy and aspirations, cuddled to the bosom of an organization and changed from a useless good-for-nothing into a flower of youth. Marczewski’s ‘The Shivers’ is an inversion of ‘Man of Marble.’ The main character struggles to achieve what Wajda’s Mateusz Birkut rejected a few years before. (…) Marczewski’s is a first film recently which is not uncompromising in a journalistic way. The grim dogmatism of the youth organization is seen here as a historical error but not as villainy. An alloy of idealism and subjective sense of rightousness determines the tragic figure of Druhna. (…) And the boy drifts apart from his mother, from the imprisoned father, from his betrayed mates. (…) Crying for joy, his head snuggled on Druhna’s rough shirt, he accepts ideology as his foster family.
history periods
