Kieślowski's Last Color

Irène Jacob played the sensitive model, Valentine, in Red. The ballerinas had previously become the heroines of Kieslowski's short documentary Seven Women of Different Ages.

Rita - a dog that will lead to the meeting of the two main characters of the film: Valentine and Judge. Kieslowski was a dog lover. His own dog starred in The Scar, Kieslowski's feature debut.

The turning point of the film. Valentine hits a dog. An accident that will lead to an encounter between a young empathetic girl and a bitter old man.

Krzysztof Kieślowski and cinematographer Piotr Sobociński look at the encounter of the old judge and Valentine. From that moment everything will change in the film. The girl will get involved with the old man and he will change her outlook on the world around her.

A separate theme: the love of August (Jean-Pierre Lorit) for Karin (Frédérique Feder) and her adultery. Kieślowski: “We adopted the conditional mode of narration - what if the judge had been born 40 years later. Everything that happens to August happened to the judge once."

A technocrane at the window of Valentine's apartment. From whose point of view is the camera looking inside? Kieslowski: “Maybe there is someone who sees it all, who is the technocrane (...). I think it's not a game of cinema, it's a game of that someone looking at us.”

In a film about chance, is a billiard ball one of its symbols? Piotr Sobociński (behind the camera), cinematographer of Red: “Every little detail was subordinated to something we had thought of beforehand (...). The result was a list of about 300 significant elements.”

The judge's car against the background of a billboard (...). The same frame will be captured by a TV camera filming survivors of a sea disaster. The billboard turned out to be one of those significant objects that carry in the film a coded foreshadowing of the events to come.

Kieślowski in his youth wanted to become a theater director. He shot his first TV feature, Personnel, partly autobiographical, in an opera house. In his last film, one of the most important scenes of Red was shot in a theater in Lausanne.