You Are God

Director: Leszek Dawid
Cast: Marcin Kowalczyk, Dawid Ogrodnik, Tomasz Schuchardt
Poland; 110’, 2012, color
Polish with Turkish subtitles

The late 1990s brought a revolution to the Polish music scene. Psychedelic rap, almost overnight, stormed the charts that for the first decade after the fall of the Soviet Union were dominated by American hits and the homegrown ‘disco-polo’ genre. Two groups in particular became household names– Kaliber 44 and Paktofonika. What both had in common was the association with the charismatic Magik. They dominated the Polish rap scene until the rapper’s suicide on 26 December 2000, when the young artist fell to his death from the window of his ninth-floor flat in a Katowice council estate. You Are God is an impressive attempt at capturing the spirit of the time in which Magik lived and recorded. New, young faces were selected for the main roles, a choice rarely made in Polish filmmaking, dominated by a handful of big names dominating both cinema and TV productions.