Norman Leto

Norman Leto (born in Poland in 1980 as Łukasz Banach), is a Polish artist, self-educated in the fields of painting, film, and new media. In 1989, at the age of nine, Banach started to use the computer as a digital drawing tool. At the age of fourteen (1994) he created his first moving pictures using 16-bit computers while also developing "analog" skills with drawing, painting, and traditional animation techniques. At the age of nineteen, long before taking the alias of "Norman Leto", he became friends with the well-known Polish painter Zdzisław Beksiński. The six-year-long friendship was broken by Beksiński’s murder in February 2005. One year later, while living in Kraków, Poland, Banach took the pseudonym of Norman Leto; his debut solo exhibition took place at the Center of Contemporary Art in Warsaw in 2007. The same year he worked with the director Krystian Lupa on "Factory Two", where his job was to prepare video sequences shown during the performance. In 2009 and 2010, Leto was a resident in New York, working on his autobiographical novel “Sailor”; he simultaneously completed a full-length film of the same title. Fully financed by the author, the film was well received at the 10th Era New Horizons Film Festival in Poland (2010), screened as part of the "New Cinema" section. Despite the authors' initial lack of interest in official, external producers or distributors, "Sailor" has been screened worldwide at art-house film festivals and in modern art institutions.

Dog. Painting by Norman Leto

In 2010 Norman moved to Warsaw. While new series of paintings continued to emerge, work on a second feature film "PHOTON" started. The film depicts the story of life as a phenomenon, and premiered at international documentary film festivals CPH:DOX, Copenhagen 2017 (European premiere) and HotDocs, Toronto 2017 (American premiere). The Polish premiere took place at the 17th T-Mobile New Horizons IFF, Wrocław, as part of the main competition. Around January 2017, Norman started work on another feature screenplay titled "Pilot". The plot is a rendition of events which took place September 11, 2001, told from the unique perspective of an actual military interceptor pilot. In May 2017 Leto appeared in the music video for Radiohead's "Promise", released in June that year.

English title: PHOTON

Original title: PHOTON

Running time (min): 107

In short, "Photon" tells the story of the phenomenon of life itself. This unusual, moving film is exceptional in that it shows what we know today about the history of the universe. The first twenty minutes of the film portray the beginnings of space per se, of stars and planets. The story then fluently transitions into the second part titled ‘Life’. The narrator (Andrzej Chyra) explains what is known today about the origins of life (and what remains unknown). How was such complex a creation as a human being formed? On several explicit examples from an average family’s everyday life, we can trace the biological foundations of phenomena such as emotions or nightmares. The final chapter of the film provides an extrapolation on the future of mankind. The incredibly visual narrative ends with a current scientific prediction on the end of the universe.

Filmography:

2010: "Sailor", 100 min. ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2007453/ )

2016: "Photon", 107 min

DCP - Michał Szwed tel. 792 232 373

Dates and places of first screening:

2017 - Copenhagen, Denmark, CPH:DOX* documentary IFF (World, European premiere)

Names of other festivals and prizes:

2017; Toronto, Canada, Hot Docs (North American premiere)

2017; Wroclaw, Poland, T-Mobile New Horizons film festival (Polish premiere)

2017; London, UK, Open City IFF (British premiere)

2017; Sydney, Australia, Antenna IFF (Australian premiere)

2017; Gdynia, Poland, Gdynia IFF

Norman Leto on "Photon":

In short, "Photon" is a story about the phenomenon of life itself. One of the reasons why I made this film is mere curiosity about this whole molecular machinery going on in every cell of my body, as well as yours. We all know something about it – sort of – but an average person’s knowledge of what's going on in their body comes mainly from TV painkiller commercials. I wanted to fill that gap. I think that in the past the molecular world was too complex to accurately portray it in cinematic or television-related attempts of any kind.

It's my second feature film, it took five years to finish it. The first part documents the life phenomenon from scratch as modern science sees it now. The entire story was consulted with scientific experts. In its middle part, the film documents my actual parents in their daily activities. Stanisław is my father, Emilia is my mother. No actors. The only person that was artificially introduced into this reality is the narrator. As a writer, director and FX person, I did not want to take on the narration role: that would be too much. My producers made it possible to work with a well-known and extremely talented Polish actor Andrzej Chyra. The commentary is nothing like David Attenborough. This difference is what gives some sort of strange shift or twist to the narration part. Almost all family scenes were shot in my hometown Bochnia with Michał Marczak as DP, with whom I've been working very closely since my first film "Sailor". The film’s final scenes are a sort of prediction on the future of life in general. I am not affected by any particular visions presented by various futurologists today. It's more like my own intuition, a synthesis that evolved from reading various visionaries and thinkers: from Karl Popper, Ray Kurzweil to David Deutsch and other more or less legitimate writers... If it is possible at all to talk about being “legit” in speculations on the far future of life.