Spoor (film)


Spoor is a 2017 Polish crime film directed by Agnieszka Holland, adapted from the novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. It was selected to compete for the Golden Bear in the main competition section of the 67th Berlin International Film Festival. At Berlin, the film won the Alfred Bauer Prize. It was selected as the Polish entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 90th Academy Awards, but it was not nominated.

Plot

The film is set in a remote mountainous region of the Kłodzko Valley in south-western Poland, where an elderly woman, Janina Duszejko, turns witness to a violent and mysterious death of several hunters. She is convinced she knows who the murderer is, but nobody believes her story.
The Polish-language title, Pokot, is a hunting term that refers to the count of wild animals killed. The English title Spoor refers to the traces and tracks left behind by the hunted game.
, south-western Poland

Cast

Critical response

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 74% based on 23 reviews, and an average rating of 6.5/10. On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 61 out of 100, based on 6 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
In a feature in Film Comment, Amy Taubin praised the film's political critique and its beauty, stating, “Sprawling, wildly beautiful, emotionally enveloping, Spoor earns its vision of utopia. It would not be the most resonant and inspiring political film of the century if it did not give us hope.”
In a positive review for the Krakow Post Giuseppe Sedia wrote, "enriched with some majestic close-ups of wild animals caught in their natural habitat and framed à la Sergei Parajanov, Holland’s film is a sturdy environmental thriller film drenched in a very Czech black humor that could charm trappers and mushroom hunters alike".
In February 2017, director Holland said in an interview for The Guardian: "One journalist for the Polish news agency wrote that we had made a deeply anti-Christian film that promoted eco-terrorism. We read that with some satisfaction and we are thinking of putting it on the promotional posters, because it will encourage people who might otherwise not have bothered to come and see it."