as of yesterday; the weather report on the TV in the Centrum metro station says it was 0 yesterday and -1 today. (Centigrade.) It feels like it’s time for hats and gloves.

Yesterday my roommate and I finished cleaning out the now-defrosted refrigerator. We were able to leave all the perishables on the balcony overnight, and they were fine, due to the above-cited temperatures.

Afterwards, I went to my first-ever Mass at the Praga Cathedral, to hear a friend’s choir sing selections during the service. The Mass was conducted in Polish, of course, but I was able to follow something about rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.

The singers were wonderful, haunting and subtle; my friend D., who works with them, says that Polish choral singers have a remarkable ability to create a blended sound. This matches my experiences with Polish actors and choral voices in a theater context. I’m looking forward to hearing more Polish choral music in a classical setting, going forward.

And then, since it was the last night of the Warsaw Film Festival, a group of people met back at the Kinoteka at the Pałac Kultury i Nauki (PKN henceforth) to see a late screening of Paddy Considine’s film “Tyrannosaur.” Wonderful British actors, very dark plot about domestic and child abuse. Beautifully shot and acted–the lead actor, Peter Mullen, was unforgettable.

Here’s director Considine talking about the film–his first:

With its thugs with pitbulls, cocky youths in pubs, and secretly abusive Christians, Considine seems to have a very bleak vision of the world. “I never made Tyrannosaur to be a film about social realism,” he insisted. “Where they are is just where they are. The world it is set is a world I understood and I wanted to make a film about human beings in pain and a film about redemption and about soulmates – two people from different sides of society – and . I wanted to make a film about love.

– article about Tyrannosaur, “Nothing prehistoric about contemporary love story,” Sheffield Telegraph