The Fifth Part of the World
Piąta strona świata
RIGHTS: WORLD
Polish Silesia, the fifth part of the world, is a place where borders disappear and history plays with people and nationalities. It is not possible to close this place within a rigid framework or to understand it from the beginning to the end. All one can do is to discover it slowly, like a kaleidoscope image made of a thousand amusing, fascinating and mysterious stories.
It took Kazimierz Kutz several years to write his first novel. He listened to local anecdotes and family epics, which allowed him to create a colourful multigenerational panorama of Silesia, a land somewhere on the border of Poland, Czech Republic and Germany. Kutz shows Silesia through the memories of a man who is trying to solve some family mystery from the past. Both the author and the main character are trying to find the right language, which would help them understand the changes brought by the passage of time and for that means they use Polish and the Silesian dialect.
Kutz is a master storyteller and his tales, both funny and terrifying, portray a whole spectrum of characters who look for their place in the world: they contend with their fate, fight and emigrate, philosophise or take life lightly.
About the author:
Kazimierz Kutz was born in 1929 in Szopienice, Upper Silesia. He is one of the most famous Polish film and theatre directors and was engaged in the formation of the most important movements in the Polish cinema such as nouvelle vague polonaise or moral anxiety cinema. In his films he is always uncompromising and direct, he likes to portray the beauty of life and the dilemmas of simple people. Kutz received several important prizes both in Poland and abroad. In 1999 the readers of the most popular Polish daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, granted Kutz the title of the most famous living Silesian of the 20th century. In 2006 the Polish, German and French LGBT organizations awarded him the Tolerance Prize in recognition of his work in the field of antidiscrimination of homosexual people. Since 1997 Kazimierz Kutz has been involved in the Polish political life and at the moment he is an MP representing the central liberal Platforma Obywatelska.
