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"Intriguing and disturbing, made with tremendous confidence and conviction." - Guardian
Vincent Gallo stars as an unnamed Taliban soldier, captured and flown to a mysterious eastern European country for interrogation. A quirk of fate sees him escape, but he grows increasingly desperate as his former captors pursue him through vast, snowbound forests, and cold and hunger push him ever closer to delirium and inhuman acts.
A hypnotic and silent manhunt thriller - throughout which Gallo does not utter a single line of dialogue - staged against a spectacular landscape, Essential Killing is veteran director Jerzy Skolimowski's hallucinatory exploration of one man's reversion to an almost animalistic state.
Winner of the Special Jury award and Best Actor at the 2010 Venice Film Festival. "A near-abstract rumination on war and survival." - Telegraph
D Jerzy Skolimowski P Ewa Piaskowska S Jerzy Skolimowski, Ewa Piaskowska WS Hanway Films L English, Polish, Arabic w/English subtitles TD 35mm/2010