Documentary ‘Sower’ (director Jerzy Kalina) has won Grand Prix at the XXth International Festival of Local Televisions in Košice, Slovakia. ‘Sower’ was produced by TVP Białystok at the commission of Belsat TV.
Over 100 films and TV programs from different countries were submitted for the competition. The jurors marked the film by Jerzy Kalina for its non-trivial usage of sowing and harvesting as metaphors of real life.
{movie}Sower, film by Jerzy Kalina.|right|17122{/movie}
The film’s protagonist is an inhabitant of the Studziwody district in Bielsk Podlaski, Doroteusz Fionik, a Belarusian, Polish citizen through family history, alumnus of a Christian Orthodox seminary and active psalmist. Founder of the Little Motherland Museum in Studziwody (the material base consists of a traditional Podlaschian homestead formerly owned by his grandparents and restored by the protagonists, as well as a house saved from being demolished), editor of an ethnographic publication “Bielski Gosciniec,” author of history books about the region. Founder of an authentic folk band “Zemerwa,” managed by his sister, Anna Fionik, he organizes cyclical ethnographic-folkloristic happenings in the Podlasie province, which include folk bands from Podlasie and the Belarusian Polesie.
During ethnographic expedition in this region, he records authentic folklore and publishes recordings of forgotten songs. He is also a farmer, maintaining several hectares of land in a traditional way with the help of his family. He cuts wheat with sickle and scythe, and threshes it with a flail. He sows it with his own hands. However, he considers it his highest duty to spread the spiritual and material culture of Podlaschian Belarusians, so that, following the evangelical sower’s example, this seed “fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown” (Matthew 13:8).
