“Mom Dies Saturday” is a psychological drama involving loss, guilt and toxic family relations. The main character faces a significant moral dilemma after the death of an immediate family member. And most importantly this is a story about monstrous hypocrisy in relation to unconditional love for the mother.
SYNOPSIS
The plot of the movie is set around the events surrounding the death of the mother of the main character, Karol and his decision to get the money of the deceased without informing his family or the officials about it. As his mother dies – as the title says – on Saturday, Karol comes up with a plan to withdraw the money from the account on Monday before the death certificate is sent to the bank, which will prevent him (as an attorney for the account) from taking the funds.
DIRECTOR STATEMENT
The author of the original story is my close friend Rafał Niemczyk, who in 2015 published a book of the same name. The film’s script was based on the book. As soon as I finished reading “Mom Dies Saturday”, I knew immediately that it was the perfect material for a short film. In the process of making the film, starting from the first pages of the script till the last day of post-production, I wanted to create a film which let the audience to draw their own conclusions.
When we take into account the toxic family and all the other factors that occur in this story, I believe that Karol is not necessarily a bad person, despite the fact that he goes to do something which is seen as morally adverse. As an outside observer, it is always easy to be judgemental of someone’s actions in a difficult situation, but when we ourselves are in the midst of an overwhelming problem, nothing is ever so simple.
Before I started the production of “Mom Dies Saturday”, it seemed to me that after watching over 5k films I would not have any problems with any element that depends on me. What could have gone wrong? Virtually every shooting day there were events that could have influenced whether the film will be made at all. After 2 weeks of post-production, I completely lost my distance to the material and had no idea if what we already had was great or tragic. On the other hand, when we finished editing, we sat with Rafal for days and wondered if this story would be comprehensible to the viewer. Creating movies is an amazing challenge and a very demanding passion. Making “Mom Dies Saturday” has made me more humble than ever in the last 20 years of my life. But when I saw it on the big screen, in the exact same theater where I saw The Matrix at 16, I only thought one thing:
I’ll never stop doing this.
DIRECTOR BIOGRAPHY
Damian Matyasik was fascinated by cinema and video games from an early age. When at the age of twelve Matyasik saw “Terminator 2” by James Cameron he became crazy about filmmaking. He promised himself that he would be making films one day. Less than 3 years later, he was the editor of one of the largest video games magazines in Poland. Before the age of 25, Matyasik won 26 national and international tournaments in video games (mainly the Tekken and Soul Calibur series). Considering the complete lack of financial and artistic support and the lack of knowledge on how to obtain it, the dreams of making films were suspended until further notice. After more than a decade of working in the video games industry, Damian was constantly thinking about films. After overcoming many adversities and obstacles, he finally kept his promise which he made to himself 20 years ago. It was always cinema that fascinated him the most and it still remains his greatest passion.
