facing the scene

The small town Swiebodzin is situated on the transit road between Berlin and Warsaw. It is neither known for historical reasons nor for its tourist attractions, but that changed through the inauguration of the biggest Jesus monument in November 2010. The film facing the scene pays attention to the surroundings and narrates the event by focussing mainly on the reactions and the behavior of the spectators. It concentrates on the preparation of this event and its dismantling at the end of the day without showing the happening as it is normally broadcasted by mass media. By looking at individual subjects as single parts of a larger community that is created through the celebration of the event the film creates a kind of narration that is constructed only by singularities passing by one after another. Deliberately the film is presented without subtitles, because the sound itself is used as an atmospheric soundscape, which emphasizes the ritual character of such events. It tries to equilibrate social, political and religious dimensions of such kind of events by figuring out their complexity and by stressing the interrelation between modernity and tradition, between urbanism and periphery, between consumer culture and power play.