Preview: What to Watch at Kinoteka 2024

 

The 22nd edition of the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival starts today in London, with the UK premiere of Agnieszka Holland's Green Border. I wrote a preview of some of the highlights of the festival, which you can read here. 

A Change of Energy? on 48th Polish Film Festival in Gdynia (18-23 September 2023)

2023 at Polish Film Festival in Gdynia (FPFF) sees the arrival of a new Artistic Director, following the departure of Tomasz Kolankiewicz after three turbulent but generally stellar years. (I think back with special fondness on the festival's "post-pandemic" edition of 2021.) A veteran of New Horizons (2002-2016) and Transatlantyk (2016-2020) festivals, Joanna Łapińska now makes history as the first female to hold the role. While acknowledging the "symbolic significance" of her appointment, Łapińska also noted the strong presence of many "wonderful, experienced women" in the festival team for years, influencing and "creating the character of this event."

Leszek Kopeć and Joanna Łapińska
(Fot. Sylvia Olszewska)

In addition to this generous assessment, Łapińska is realistic in her appraisal of the particular challenges that FPFF poses for an Artistic Director, ones that Kolankiewicz has been vocal about in a recent interview. "Many elements of the Festival are dictated by rules and regulations," Łapińska admitted. "When it comes to the whole programme, I prepare it, propose it, but in the end I need the Organising Committee’s acceptance... This is an environment in which we must demonstrate great diplomacy, but also the ability to compromise."

The notable absence in the Main Competition of at least two of the year's major Polish releases - Agnieszka Holland's government-derided, Venice-premiered migrant drama The Green Border (Zielona Granica), which  opened in Polish cinemas on the very weekend that the Festival closed, and Małgorzata Szumowska's Woman Of..., which also debuted at Venice - clearly speaks to those challenges and compromises. 

But Łapińska, though appointed late, has nonetheless succeeded in creating a very solid programme for her first FPFF, one that retained the same structure as the last years' editions - a Main Competition, a Microbudget Competition, a Short Film Competition, and other established strands - while incorporating a few fresh touches, such as "The Big Five," a section inviting iconic figures of Polish cinema to screen a favourite Polish film and discuss it with the Festival audience. The 15 new films I saw during my stay - 13 from the Main Competition and 2 from the Microbudget one - naturally varied in quality but included enough diversity, highlights and surprises to make for a memorable, satisfying 48th edition of Poland's Cannes. 

Doppelgänger. Sobowtór 

Doppelgänger. Sobowtór (Doppelgänger. The Double) was this year's opening film, and proved a belter. Jan Holoubek, director of 25 lat niewinności. Sprawa Tomka Komendy (25 Years of Innocence. The Case of Tomek Komenda) (2020) and the Wielka Woda TV series (2022) and screenwriter Andrzej Gołda fashion a tense, absorbing spy drama, inspired by various real life cases, which parallels the experiences of two protagonists, played by Jakub Gierszał and Tomasz Schuchardt, on either side of the Iron Curtain, unknown to each other yet intimately linked. Essentially a story of identity theft and its political/personal consequences in a Cold War context, Doppelgänger is technically accomplished, with terrific production design  by Marek Warszewski evoking place and period in a tactile way, and superb cinematography by Bartłomiej Kaczmarek that subtly ramps up the tension with some delicious slow zooms. 

Though Schuchardt's role feels underdeveloped compared to Gierszał's, the transitions between the two locations are elegantly managed, and the protagonists' eventual encounter both understated and oddly touching. A rather rushed conclusion brings a slight sense of a let-down, but the stylish Doppelgänger still takes its place alongside superior latter-day spy dramas like Billy Ray's Breach (2007) and Christian Carion's Farewell (2009), a well-judged James Bond allusion highlighting its difference in terms of intimacy and moral unease.

Ultima Thule

In an entirely different  mode, Gierszał also gave a fine performance in Ultima Thule - a deserved winner of the Microbudget Competition. Klaudiusz Chrostowski's lovely, quietly restorative, low-key drama is about a young man seeking escape and solitude on Shetland and gradually making a new kind of life there. 

Indeed, films focusing on adrift, highly strung or under-pressure males - or what one might more generously call themes of "masculinity in crisis" - made up a substantial part of the Festival programme this year. A fresh addition to Polish cinema in 2012 when Leszek David burst onto the scene with Jesteś Bogiem, about hip hop group Paktofonika, the Polish rap film has since become cliche-ridden and  irresistibly susceptible to parody,  inevitably featuring appearances by real-life artists and plots that find baseball cap-sporting protagonists swaggering around the streets, getting involved in crime or drugs, and endlessly greeting each other as "mordo" or "stary."

Życie w błocie się złoci

While last year's Zadra brought some new energy to the genre by focusing on a female rapper, this year's Festival offered up two such examples. Życie w błocie się złoci (Life in the Mud is Golden), directed by Piotr Kujawiński, centred on the travails of an aspiring hip hop star contending with an alcoholic father, the care of his young sister, and a drugs-related arrest. Narratively shaky, the film is notable for a couple of vibrant music sequences and the last screen appearance by veteran Jan Nowicki. 

Freestyle

At once slicker and sillier, Maciek Bochniak's Freestyle (in the Main Competition) ends up somewhere between Uncut Gems (2019) and a Guy Ritchie caper in its focus on a young rapper (Maciej Musiałowski, forever kicking something in frustration) trying to outsmart adversaries that include gangsters, drug dealers, loan sharks, and his lover's boyfriend. I started out taking Freestyle quite seriously but gradually found myself giggling helplessly as ever-more-unlikely plot twists piled up. Already available on Netflix, Bochniak's film is terrible trash but great fun - best experienced with some pals and plenty of booze on hand.

Horror Story

Anxieties of urban and country experience received contrasting treatments in two fine debut features. A stylised Gothic comedy of Gen Z job-seeking and cohabitation woes, Adrian Apanel's enjoyable Horror Story throws away several promising ideas but still lands some big laughs as it relishes putting its young protagonist (superb  Jakub Zając), an initially eager, increasingly beleaguered graduate in "business and finance," through a series of Coenesque humiliations. 

Tyle co nic

The most overtly political film that I saw at the Festival, Grzegorz Dębowski's Tyle co Nic (Next to Nothing) uses familiar but still potent means of realist social cinema to highlight the difficulties of a group of farmers, screwed over by a local MP, one of whom ends up dead. Despite some heavy-handed symbolism, Dębowski creates an involving drama, and a worthy addition to the growing canon of flawed but interesting contemporary Polish provincial films, including Wszystkie nasze strachy (Fears) and Po miłość/Pour l'amour (both 2021). The film particularly shows its intelligence in a well-written late scene between the MP and the hero (Artur Paczesny).  Paczesny was the winner of the Festival's lead male acting prize, and the film itself took the Visions Apart "Golden Claw" award. 

Chłopi

Two highly anticipated Main Competition films sought to add something fresh to Polish historical drama, with mixed results. Arriving on a wave of acclaim from TIFF, and about to screen at LFF, Chłopi (The Peasants) finds DK and Hugh Welchman applying the same process of hand-drawn animation to live action footage that proved attention-grabbing in their Loving Vincent (2017) to an adaptation of Władysław Reymont's four-volume epic. 

Notwithstanding a couple of standout dancing sequences - enhanced by the film's rousing score - it's hard to see what the painstaking animation process contributes this time around. Zoning in on the text's themes of female transgression and victimhood (the final scenes are practically Lars von Trier-worthy), the adaptation undoubtedly has a modish quality - "a stark portrait of old-school misogyny," noted Nick Schager, approvingly, in his rave review - that will probably make it an international hit. (It's already announced as Poland's Oscar candidate.) But if you don't respond to the visuals then Chłopi simply feels neither fish nor fowl, suspended in a limbo between live action and animation that finally diminishes the expressive power of both.

Kos

Having delivered one of the splashiest debut films in recent Polish cinema with 2017's Atak Paniki - a part-Wild Tales, part-11 Minutes multi-stranded dark comedy of contemporary anxieties - Paweł Maślona returns with Kos (unfortunate English title: Scarborn) which won the Festival's top Golden Lions prize. Kos centres on another return: that of General Tadeusz Kościuszko from the American War of Independence to Poland where, with the freed African American slave Domingo, he's intent on mobilising the Polish peasantry and gentry against their Russian invaders.

Part pageant, part pantomime, influences from Shakespeare to Tarantino are discernible in Kos but I'd expected a weirder, wilder ride from this film. In fact, it feels straitjacketed - a semi-postmodern historical drama that becomes weirdly static in its second half, confined to chat in interior locations, before a final bloodbath.

Kos

The film is quite bold in drawing parallels between the experiences of African slaves and Polish peasants - yes, there's a scene of scars comparison - and the presence of Jason Mitchell as Domingo is welcome, though the development of the character rather less so. Too self-consciously, Maślona makes Domingo a transplant from contemporary American cinema rather than a freshly imagined character - he's a fish-out-of-water comic sidekick constantly cussing and cracking wise. (Notably, he's the first to burst through the stately historical ambience of the film's opening with an f-bomb.) 

Having remarked on non-white representation in the Festival's programme over the last years - from Kler (2018)'s moment of racist caricaturing through the Senegalese scammer portrayed in Po miłość/Pour l'amour to the undeveloped migrant characters in Silent Land (2021) and Bread and Salt (2022) - it would be tempting to see Kos as an advance. It is - but only in part, since, through Domingo's contemporary colloquialisms, the film appears to imply that a Black character can only exist in a period context as an anachronism. 

Luckily, the charismatic Mitchell succeeds in bringing a touch of grit to the limited characterisation. In contrast, Jacek Braciak as Kos himself seems muted, an afterthought; one might charitably consider this a deliberate choice made to undercut national myth-making but it still leaves a gaping hole at the centre of the film. Ultimately, the greatest pleasures in Kos come from the juicy work of the supporting cast: Robert Więckiewicz as the Russian cavalry captain, forever reminding everyone just how much Poland needs "Mother Russia"; Agnieszka Grochowska's sharp-witted widow; and a barnstorming Piotr Pacek, gleefully building on his repertoire of sadistic siblings after Król (2020). 

Święto ognia

A film by Kinga Dębska is always a welcome, friendly prospect; I count myself a fan of the writer-director's brand of warm but tart comedy-drama since the Gdynia screening of Moje córki krowy back in 2015. In Święto ognia (Feast of Fire) Dębska adapts Jakub Małecki's novel in a way that fits perfectly with her own sensibilities, focusing on two teenage sisters dealing with body issues: the first pursuing her career as a ballet dancer, the second (the film's narrator) born with cerebral palsy and dedicated to observing the world from her balcony. The film was a worthy winner of two acting prizes, with Paulina Pytlak honoured as best newcomer and the venerable Kinga Preis as supporting actress for her glowing performance as the sisters' neighbour. 

Lęk

A tougher proposition as a sibling drama, also much centred around the body, is Sławomir Fabicki's Lęk (Anxiety), which reunites Magdalena Cielecka and Marta Nieradkiewicz from Tomasz Wasilewski's United States of Love (2016), again cast as sisters here. This time the pair are on the road, driving Cielecka's terminally ill Małgorzata to a Swiss clinic to end her life. Nieradkiewicz's Lucja still has serious doubts about her sister's decision, though, viewing it as a definitive example of the control freakery with which Małgorzata has always set about managing her own and others' experiences. 

As well as the two actresses, Fabicki brings something of Wasilewski's "transgressive" spirit to these proceedings, especially in a humiliating scene of an aborted tryst over a car bonnet, and a distinctly icky moment of sisterly sexual healing. But, working from Monika Sobień-Górska's screenplay, he also modulates the tone more effectively, keeping the proceedings fluid with some mordant humour and unexpected developments. Lęk is at its best when least straining, avoiding pathos or polemic in its most well-observed intimate scenes. The actresses both deliver, achieving a Bergman-worthy intensity of feeling at times. 

Sny pełne dymu

Apart from Piotr Dumała's typically eccentric (if far from fully realised) Fin del Mundo?, the most daring films I saw at this year's Festival both came from female filmmakers. Dorota Kędzierzawska surprised with Sny pełne dymu (Dreams Full of Smoke), an intimate two-hander for Krzysztof Globisz and Żaneta Łabudzka-Grzesiuk. (A fond nod to Kędzierzawska's regular, now late, collaborator Danuta Szaflarska is also included.) By turns lyrical, smutty, soulful and hilarious, the dialogue-rich film prompted more walkouts than any other I saw at the Festival but proved a hypnotic experience for those on its wavelength: a true film poem, given wings by its actors' perfectly calibrated duet. (When Łabudzka-Grzesiuk tells Globisz "Nikt nie mówi „kurwa” piękniej niż Ty" - "No-one says 'fuck' more beautifully than you" - we can only agree.)

 

Imago

My favourite film of this year's Festival, however, was Olga Chajdas's Imago - winner of the Silver Lions and leading actress prizes. A deeply personal project for its fearless co-writer/star Lena Góra (known for her role as the transgressive daughter in Król, and as the star and writer of last year's great Roving Woman), Imago finds the actress playing her own mother, Ela (Malwina) Góra, a singer in several '80s alternative bands. 

The film's perfect, psychologically-savvy title and poster design suggest Bergman. But Imago is very much its own unruly, lurching, restless and beautiful beast. At once an expressionistic portrait of the emotional ups-and-downs of its heroine and a vibrant evocation of the post-punk Tri-City artistic scene - you've never seen an '80s Poland quite like this on screen before - the film  moves to its own innovative, jagged rhythms, with great, edgy editing and  cinematography (by Pavel Hrdlička and Tomasz Naumiak, respectively) and a fantastic soundtrack.  

One of Ela's tics involves moving her single earring from one ear to the other - resulting in what she describes as "a change of energy." Imago itself boasts multiple "changes of energy"; the film is a rich and immersive ride with a gorgeous ending. Despite such exciting wildcards in its Main Competition, FPFF 2023 itself tended more towards continuity than change, overall. But all positive indications are that Łapińska is the right Artistic Director to balance both elements, as the Festival heads towards its 50th anniversary in two years' time. 

The 48th Polish Film Festival in Gdynia took place from 18-23 September. Full programme details here. 

Kinoteka 2023 Preview (BFI online)

 

The 21st edition of Kinoteka Polish Film Festival in London takes place  9 March - 27 April. I wrote a preview of the festival which you can read here.

Silences, Splinter, Salt: on the 47th Polish Film Festival in Gdynia (12-17 September)

 

Last year's Polish Film Festival in Gdynia - the festival's return to an in-person event after 2020's was held exclusively online - proved a particularly satisfying edition of Poland's primary showcase for its national cinema. Reflecting the careful curation of artistic director Tomasz Kolankiewicz, the diverse programme encompassed commercial and arthouse films, autobiographical family comedies (Zupa Nic), winking, retro musicals (Bo we mnie jest seks) and epically-scaled political dramas (Leave No Traces) across the Main and Microbudget Competitions, alongside an expanded "Pure Classics" section, the Short Film Competition, and a wide set of industry events. 

Dorota Pomykała, Filip Bajon, Agnieszka Smoczyńska,
and other winners of the 47th edition
 (Fot. Krzysztof Mystkowski/KFP/SFP)

In terms of diversity of selection, the just-concluded 47th edition of the festival pretty much maintained the momentum of last year. Quality control, though, was somewhat patchier this time around. At a whopping 20 films (13 by men and 7 by women, gender watchers), the Main Competition felt overstuffed, to say the least. This is, in part, a result of the festival's decision to dispense with the Visions Apart competition - the Un Certain Regard-esque sidebar inaugurated by former artistic director Michał Oleszczyk in 2014 that showcased more experimental productions, and for which the current, very erratic Microbudget Comp doesn't serve as a substitute. (Oddly, the Visions Apart "Golden Claw" prize has been retained, while the sidebar itself has not.)  

Tomasz Kolankiewicz
(Fot. Krzysztof Mystkowski/KFP/SFP)

Still, the latest edition of FPFF yielded several worthwhile films, some of which suggested a healthy broadening of perspective - at least to some extent -  in Polish cinema. In this report, I won't focus on the larger-scaled international co-productions that I'll write about in detail elsewhere - such as Agnieszka Smoczyńska's The Silent Twins (winner of this year's main Golden Lions prize) and Jerzy Skolimowski's mighty EO (bizarrely awarded no prizes at all by the jury) - but rather on some of the other titles I saw that equally deserve some attention. 

Orzeł. Ostatni patrol 

Many films in last year's festival focused on Poland in the 1980s. While that decade was also present this year in Kolankiewicz's welcome innovation to screen films from 1982 and 1983 (the two years in which the festival did not take place due to the imposition of martial law), the new features found filmmakers grappling more consistently with contemporary realities. Historical films of all periods were in a minority in the programme, but still ended up being extravagantly honoured by the jury with Michał Kwieciński's Filip winning the Silver Lions prize, plus the award for cinematography, and Jacek Bławut's Orzeł. Ostatni patrol (Below the Surface) taking the director prize and awards for sound and editing. (The two films also shared the award for Best Make-Up.) 

Brigitte Bardot Cudowna

By far the most idiosyncratic of the films set in the past was Lech Majewski's Brigitte Bardot Cudowna (The Wonderful Brigitte Bardot), a highly personal work with wide, playfully employed mythic resonances. The plot revolves around the imaginative search of a teenage boy (Kacper Olszewski, of Król and Baby Bump) for his missing father, who never returned to Poland after fighting in the UK in WWII. It's a journey that takes the protagonist far from the reality of '60s PRL Katowice and down various rabbit holes that bring him into contact with multiple mentors and icons of pop and high culture, among them The Beatles, The Saint's Simon Templar (Piotr Pacek), Bardot (Joanna Opozda), Cezanne (Eryk Lubos) and Rabindranath Tagore (Igor Kujawski), who critiques the whole notion of the quest that the hero has embarked on. 

Unfashionably referential and allusive - a homage to Godard felt particularly touching, as news of the director's death reached the festival - Majewski's film gets more unfocused as it progresses. But its vivid design, intellectual wit and capacity to confound make it a rich and distinctive work that's likely to yield more and more on repeated viewings. Unfortunately, like Skolimowski's's EO, the film was completely snubbed in terms of awards, suggesting that this particular jury was quite resistant to honouring veteran mavericks still producing vital, ambitious films in their later years. 

Matecznik

The work of one talented young writer-director, Grzegorz Mołda, appeared in both Competitions. Mołda's first feature Matecznik (The Hatcher) was part of the Microbudget set, while his Zadra (Splinter) was presented in the Main Comp. Very different but with aesthetics carefully suited to their subjects, the films were both highlights of their respective sections. 

Matecznik

Matecznik focuses on the dynamic between a young offender (Michał Zielinski) and the "tutor" (Agnieszka Kryst) who is preparing him for reintegration into society, and who appears to view her role as a combination of warden, mother, lover, playmate, parole officer, and priest. As the pair's exercises take on increasingly perverse, coercive undertones - with the introduction of a crying doll named Nola and the dispensing of marks for masturbation - the film centres subtle shifts in the scenario, while seemingly expressing a certain anxiety about female power. 

Reminiscent of Yorgos Lanthimos's early work in its framing and "cinema of sadism" inclinations, Matecznik remains compelling thanks to strong performances and Mołda's confident sense of rhythm and pace. Aided by the razor-sharp editing of the brilliant duo Piasek & Wójcik (whose work I first noticed in Ewa Podgorska's Diagnosis), the film succeeds in sustaining a chilly, claustrophobic ambience. 

Zadra 

In contrast to Matecznik's deliberate mood of restrained unease, Mołda's second film, Zadra, leaps of the screen with infectious energy and a very different kind of heroine. The story of an aspiring rapper (Magdalena Wieczorek) encountering an established star (Jakub Gierszał) who might help her career, the film tips its baseball cap to earlier films focusing on the experiences of female performers in the music world, from A Star is Born and Wild Rose to Tomasz Habowski's Piosenki o miłości (Songs About Love), shown at last year's festival. The second half defaults somewhat to moral melodrama illustrating the perils of success. But Mołda shows great skill in integrating the music (including in an exhilarating sequence of car destruction), which all serve a narrative purpose and avoid the monotony of tone that marred last year's acclaimed hip hop musical Inni ludzie. Intelligent and exciting at its best, Zadra deserves to be a hit. 

Johnny

I wouldn't say the same for another Main Competition entry, Daniel Jaroszek's Johnny; however, it seems that the film already gained plenty of admirers, since it won with this year's Audience Award. Yet Jaroszek's debut feature feels totally synthetic in its account of the real-life relationship between the priest Father Jan Kaczkowski (Dawid Ogrodnik) and the drug-taking thief Patryk Galewski (Piotr Trojan), on whom the former's unflagging spirit, wit and wisdom soon have a redemptive impact. 

Johnny

Very crude in its depiction of its maverick hero's conflicts with the Church establishment, the film doesn't even succeed in making the relationship between its leads very appealing; Maciej Kraszewski's script relies on sitcom-ish comedy and mushy sentiment by turns. Ogrodnik, though highly skilled, seems to have fallen into the Michael Sheen trap of constantly playing real people, so his performances are essentially being judged on their effectiveness as impersonations. Trojan, an actor who can bring an edge of theatrical intensity to even a small role (such as his scene in last year's Hyacinth), also fails to thrive here, despite winning the Best Actor prize (his second, following his win for 25 lat niewinności. Sprawa Tomka Komendy just two years ago). Jaroszek's background in commercials and pop promos is evident in some manic cross-cutting and obvious music cues; overall, Johnny has the same kind of forced energy and emotional fakery as 2011's The Intouchables, another broad-strokes buddy movie that became a big box office success.

Apokawixa

Winner of the Golden Claw, Xawery Żuławski's Apokawixa certainly stood out as the Main Competition's wild card. Championed as Poland's first zombie film, Żuławski's film seems a tailor-made cult item, with the director mobilising the genre to comment on a range of current topics - Covid, climate change, generational conflicts - and doing so with plenty of wild humour and just about enough gore. In part, the film seemed to be acclaimed more for what viewers wanted it to be than what it's actually ended up as, since its clunky cross-cutting and sometimes strained silliness make for a rather long two hours. But the movie boasts some high spots, not least a memorably unhinged turn from an off-the-leash Sebastian Fabijański. 

Słoń

The antithesis of Apokawixa's brashness, humour and flash, Kamil Krawczycki's Słoń (Elephant) offers a modest, low-key, realist take on the experiences of its young protagonist. Following the success of Wszystkie nasze strachy (Fears) and Hyacinth last year, Krawczycki's debut film is another addition to Poland's growing canon of LGBTQ+ cinema, and overall it's a welcome one.  The film focuses on the romance that develops between a country boy, Bartek (Jan Hyrnkiewicz, who previously made an impression as the caustic nationalist in Nic Nie Ginie), who is diligently working on his family farm in Podhale, and Dawid (Pawel Tomaszewski), a neighbour who rejected country life years before but who returns to the village for his father's funeral. 

The influence of Francis Lee's God's Own Country (2017) and Catherine Corsini's Summertime (2015) (among others) is felt in Słoń, while a scene of homophobic graffiti scrawled on a wall even harks all the way back to Victim (1961). Still, the film succeeds in involving us on its own terms. Krawczycki is at his best in bringing out intimate, contemplative moments and the film is quite insightful in its attention to the choice between familial responsibility and desire for something different that Dawid awakens in Bartek, a conflict compellingly evoked through the sensitivity and strength of Hyrnkiewicz's performance. The conclusion is less satisfying than the set-up, but, having won the Microbudget Prize, Krawczycki's touching film looks highly likely to find a home at festivals outside of Poland in the coming year. 

Głupcy

This year's festival was also particularly rich in strong performances by actresses, even in less than fully realised films. These included Agata Buzek's finely honed work as a mother obsessively searching for her missing daughter in Marta Minorowicz's flawed but interesting combo of procedural and spiritual drama Iluzja (Ilusion), and Dorota Kolak's committed performance in Tomasz Wasilewski's otherwise risible Głupcy (Fools).

If there was a prize given for the amount of audience walkouts, Wasilewski's film would certainly be the recipient. A specialist in romantic and sexual miseries of both homo and hetero varieties, the writer-director here turns his attention to what is revealed - very belatedly! - to be an incestuous liaison between Kolak's Marlena and her son (Łukasz Simlat).

While one wouldn't deny the consistency of Wasliewski's vision (from the artful sound and set design, to Oleg Mutu's cinematography), the end result feels painfully calculated and ersatz: an adolescent idea of "serious cinema." The director's increasing inability to modulate tone also means that Głupcy soon settles into the same terminally grim mood as its predecessors. Apparently, the director struggled to convince Kolak to take the role, and it's hard not to feel that her instinct to refuse it was correct. Still, she's a blessing in the part; without her intelligent interpretation, the exotic wallpaper adorning the dwellings is what you might remember most from this foolish enterprise. 

Kobieta na dachu 

The best film focusing on a female lead was Anna Jadowska's superb Kobieta na dachu (Woman on the Roof), for which Dorota Pomykała, already awarded at Tribeca, was a deserved recipient of this year's Best Actress prize. Pomykała plays Mirka, a depressed, recessive 60-year-old midwife (the same profession as Marlena in Głupcy, and evidently chosen for its symbolic cultural associations) whose reasons for attempting to rob a bank  with a kitchen knife are unfolded as the film progresses. 

Shot in light, exposing tones as Mirka moves through various institutions, or interacts with her bullish husband (Bogdan Koca) and sympathetic son (Adam Bobik), the film makes its social points without  stridency, delicately creating a picture of a woman who has suppressed her voice and needs in the service of others for many years. Kobieta na dachu initially evokes Mike Leigh's work: shot from certain angles (the film often favours profile portraits of its heroine), Pomykała bears something of a resemblance to Brenda Blethyn, while an early scene in which the police arrive at the family flat has strong Vera Drake (2004) vibes. 

Yet nothing feels overly familiar or forced here; scenes often don't progress as you expect - a sequence depicting a therapeutic New Age greetings ritual is a case in point - and Pomykała subtly finds many shades in the role as she charts the character's understated awakening. Funny, moving and humane, Kobieta na dachu ranks alongside Daria Woszek's more stylised Marygoround (2020) as one of the best female portraits in recent cinema, Polish or otherwise. 

Cicha ziemia

Finally, two extremely accomplished films, both bearing a Michael Haneke influence, explored the relations of Polish characters with ethnic "others": one on home turf and one abroad. Aga Woszczyńska's Cicha ziemia (Silent Land), about the Sardinian vacation of a Polish couple, Adam and Anna, being disrupted by the death of a Middle Eastern migrant worker in their villa's swimming pool, didn't seem to stir much interest. That's possibly because the film already opened in Polish cinemas and screened at festivals abroad, where it was generally critiqued for superficiality and a too obviously harsh perspective on its privileged protagonists (the perfectly complementary flaxen duo of Agnieszka Żulewska and Dobromir Dymecki, who previously appeared as these characters in in Woszczyńska's Cannes-featured graduation film Fragments).

But the film's take on Adam and Anna finally seems more open and ambivalent than detractors have allowed, and Cicha ziemia proves particularly compelling in exploring the couple's emotional states as they shift through indifference, fear, callousness and remorse. Aided by Bartosz Świnarski's lensing, the film's mix of sensuality and chill casts a hypnotic spell. It's released in UK cinemas on 23rd September, and I thoroughly recommend it. 

Chleb i sól

Following its recent win of Venice's Orrizonti competition, Chleb i sól, the debut feature by Damian Kocur, was much more warmly welcomed by critics and audiences - even though it also failed to find favour with the unpredictable jury. Inspired by real events, the film's focus is the return of Tymek, a young pianist and student at Warsaw University of Music, to his hometown of Strzelce Opolskie for the holidays, where he's met by his brother (the real life sibling duo of Tymoteusz and Jacek Bies take these roles) and spends time with his old friends. 

Tymek's new perspective on this crew is a bit disdainful: for him, they're too content to plot their futures in the town and pass their time just hanging out, including at the local kebab joint. It's this location that becomes a focal point of the film, as Tymek observes the growing tension between his friends and the Arab owners, while nursing his own ambiguous interest in one of them, Yousef (Nadim Suleiman).

Chleb i sól

Kocur's film is exceptionally intelligent: it creates a thoroughly authentic atmosphere that allows the viewer plenty of interpretive space. With an excellent cast comprised of non-professionals, Chleb i sól presents the interactions and personalities of the friends in a holistic way, showing them as capable of casual cruelty, insight and emotional depth, and it doesn't fall into the trap of merely allowing its main protagonist a superior vantage point. Having expressed interest in Yousef - "Did they welcome you with bread and salt?" he asks, referring to the symbolic expression of greeting and  hospitality linking many cultures - Tymek, both outsider and insider, gradually backs away from his own feelings, opting for the security of the group. 

Chleb i sól

At one moment the film's debt to Haneke is a bit too overt: a scene of racist harassment on a night bus, through effective in context, comes straight from the famed subway scene in Code Unknown (2000). Still, Chleb i sól's control of pace and tone, and the authenticity of its social portrait gesturing to wider concerns, makes the film one of the year's most important Polish productions. 

For all their strengths, Cicha ziemia and Chleb i sól both have a drawback - namely, the way in which their non-white characters ultimately serve as ciphers: representative figures for the Polish protagonists' fears, projections, curiosity, hostility, or fantasies. 

Along with the important addition of The Silent Twins, the inclusion of both films could be said to constitute an advance on last year - in which the only significant non-white character to feature in the festival's films was the Senegalese online scammer played by Mamadou Ba in Andrzej Mańkowski's Po miłość / Pour l'amour (although, on the other hand, Ba's character at least had plenty of dialogue and the opportunity to articulate a perspective on events). Clearly, the creation of films centring migrants as protagonists is still one of the challenges facing contemporary Polish cinema, which is yet to present such characters as complicated, fully realised individuals, welcomed to the screen with bread and salt.  

The 47th Polish Film Festival in Gdynia took place between 12-17 September. A full list of films screened can be found here. 

Related reading: Review of last year's festival 

Powrót do Gdyni: on the 46th Polish Film Festival (20-25 September 2021)

 

Held online-only in a delayed edition last December, where its condensed programme included Piotr Domalewski's Jak najdalej stąd (I Never Cry), Małgorzata Szumowska's Śniegu już nigdy nie będzie (Never Gonna Snow Again), and Tomasz Jurkiewicz's Każdy ma swoje lato  (Everyone Has a Summer), Polish Film Festival's 46th edition was able to take place in person in Gdynia last week. "Poland's Cannes" is a Festival that means a lot to me, so seeing it return to full power this year was heartening, to say the least. 

Jacek Bromski and Agnieszka Holland
(Photo: PAP Adam Warzawa)

Retaining (some might say regaining) its central place in the nation's film culture, the Festival remains dedicated to honouring Polish film past, with an expanded "Pure Classics" selection that this year celebrated Munk and Kieślowski and presented a Platinum Lions Award for lifetime achievement to Agnieszka Holland, who, noting her position as the first female recepient, highlighted the dire situation of refugees currently at the Polish border in her speech. 

Tomasz Kolankiewicz (Photo: Materialy Prasowe)

Most importantly, of course, FPFF is there to showcase Polish film present via its three central strands: the Main Competition, the Microbudget Competition, and the Short Film Competition. Lacking an artistic director for a couple of years, the Festival is now under the creative stewardship of Tomasz Kolankiewicz, whose intelligent guidance showed in a highly diverse but coherent programme that made for one of the most satisfying Gdynias I've attended, matching the strong showings of the 2015 and 2018 editions (and, incidentally, compensating for this year's quite disappointing New Horizons). Further reviews of individual films and interviews from the Festival will be published in the coming months but I wanted to first record a few more personal impressions of the event here. 

(Un)acceptable in the '80s

A quickly-apparent aspect of this year's programme was the amount of films looking back to the 1980s, a fraught, transformative decade in Polish history that contemporary filmmakers evidently feel freshly compelled to investigate. Director Jan P. Matuszyński described this period to me as one "full of untold stories," and it's this rich seam that writers and directors are mining in both political and personal ways, as they approach the era with attitudes ranging from wry nostalgia to fierce critique. 

Matuszyński's own film falls firmly into the latter camp. Opening in 1983, Żeby nie było śladów (Leave No Traces), which debuted at Venice and screens at London FF in a couple of weeks, is a rich, chunky drama about the case of Grzegorz Przemek. A high school graduate and son of poet and activist Barbara  Sadowska (Sandra Korzeniak), the young man was arrested by the Militia after refusing to show his  ID. With friend Jurek (Tomasz Ziętek), he's taken into custody and viciously assaulted (the title refers to an officer's stipulation to "leave no marks" on the body), subsequently dying in hospital of his injuries. The wide-ranging government cover-up operation that seeks to discredit Jurek as the only witness is the central focus of the film. 

Matuszyński is a formidably intelligent filmmaker and, perhaps inspired by his work on the very entertaining 8-part Król series, he here combines an expansive approach with the intimacy that distinguished his indelible debut feature Ostatnia Rodzina (The Last Family) (2016). Some commentators have critiqued this strategy, deeming the result overlong and diffuse. For me, Leave No Traces remained the Festival's most accomplished film. Vivid, sensitive, absorbing, and one of the few works I've seen this year that truly earns and uses its lengthy running time, its impact is also enhanced by the case's connection to a wider, post-George Floyd focus on instances of police brutality, the kind explored in (Black) British contexts in Steve McQueen's Mangrove and Ken Fero's documentaries, such as the recent Ultraviolence. 

While Leave No Traces constructs a portrait of People's Republic corruption with intertexts ranging from Wajda's cinema to Michael Mann's epically-scaled crime dramas, other films took radically different approaches to '80s realities. Mateusz Rakowicz's super-stylised Najmro. Kocha, kradnie, szanuje (The Getaway King) turns the decade into the setting for an exuberant caper comedy that plays out as a hyper Polish take on David Lowery's The Old Man & the Gun (2018),  with a star performance from Dawid Ogrodnik as the endlessly-absconding criminal. 

Kinga Dębska's Zupa Nic, meanwhile, presents PRL privations in the context of a warm but tart family comedy drama. (Dębska's characterful films never seem to have much luck with English language titles, though: Zupa Nic has been witlessly translated as Back Then - a bland moniker that could potentially fit about half the films in this year's Main Competition.)

Zupa Nic

Episodic to the point of plotlessness, Zupa Nic turns a bit too soft as it progresses but it's delightfully performed, often laugh-out-loud funny - "That line freak would buy a tank if people were queuing up for it!" complains Kinga Preis' harried, Solidarity-active matriarch following a questionable purchase made by her spouse (adorable Adam Woronowicz) - and certainly Dębska's most satisfying film since Moje córki krowy (These Daughters of Mine, gah) back in 2015. 

Powrót do Legolandu

A similar savouring of '80s domestic detail and attention to coveted objects (from Lego to VCRs) was evident in Konrad Aksinowicz's Powrót do Legolandu (Return to Legoland), based, like Zupa Nic, on its writer-director's own background. Maciej Stuhr stars here as an apparently charming patriarch returning to his wife and teenage son with shiny Western goodies after a prolonged period in the US. Joyous to start, the film boasts a mid-point tonal shift that Aksinowicz fumbles, turning the piece into a monotonous and uninsightful domestic melodrama about the difficulties of living with an alcoholic that serves as little more than a vehicle for Stuhr to deliver a committed (but indulgent) display of drunk acting. 

Hyacinth © Bartosz Mrozowski

Gay Times and Country Life

A highlight of New Horizons, where it premiered last month, Piotr Domalewski's Netflix-produced Hyacinth (which won Marcin Ciastoń this year's best screenplay prize) exemplifies the kind of "untold story" to which Matuszyński referred in its focus on the targeted campaign against homosexuals in mid-80s Poland known as "Akcja Hiacynt". Also concerned with police brutality, and boasting another fine performance from Tomasz Ziętek, this time on the other side of the law (for a while, at least), the film stood up extremely well to a second viewing, revealing beneath its police procedural trappings a love story between two protagonists who are each concealing the whole truth from the other.

Wszystkie nasze strachy

As a film about Polish LGBTQ+ experience Hyacinth was joined in the FPFF Main Competition by Wszystkie nasze strachy (Fears) directed by Łukasz Ronduda and Łukasz Gutt, which was the eventual winner of the top Golden Lions prize for Best Film. The film is inspired by the life of Daniel Rycharski, the gay Catholic artist from the village of Kurówka. It makes the suicide of an (underwritten) lesbian friend the catalyst for the decision of Rycharski (played by Dawid Ogrodnik with the artist's signature bleached blonde hair and rainbow-striped tracksuit) to suggest a Way of the Cross for his friend as a redemptive action undertaken by the whole community whom he sees as implicated in her death. 

Daniel Rycharski & Dawid Ogrodnik. (Fot. Jarosław Sosiński)

Compromised by several aspects including the miscasting of Ogrodnik, a generally uncritical acceptance of Rycharski's own self-image, and an overreliance on choral vocalising to whip up an emotional response, Wszystkie nasze strachy's scooping of the main prize surely represented a politically-motivated gesture of LGBTQ+ solidarity on the jury's part. Lacking an objective stance on its hero, the film still scores in some of its intimate scenes (the protagonist's interactions with his supportive babcia are a crowd-pleasing highlight), its beautiful cinematography (by Gutt), and the subtler moments in which the screenplay by Ronduda, Katarzyna Sarnowska and Michał Oleszczyk attends a bit to the contradictions inherent in Rycharski's position as a figure self-consciously bridging contemporary Poland's polarisation. 

Here and Now, Black and White 

A less high-profile but intriguing exploration of the Polish province, religion and desire came courtesy of Po miłość / Pour l'amour, which screened in the Microbudget Competition. Andrzej Mańkowski's decidedly odd drama puts Jowita Budnik (who also makes the most of a small role as the grieving mother in Wszystkie nasze strachy) through the physical and emotional mill. Here Budnik plays a school cleaner, Marlena, who finds herself caught between an abominable husband with a drinking problem and a smooth-talking Senegalese scammer (Mamadou Ba) who contacts her via a social media app. 

Much concerned with the escapist and exploitative potential of Internet interaction - which it also explores via a not-too-subtly-developed subplot involving Budnik's young colleague (Patrycja Ziniewicz) who ends up slut-shamed by the rural community - the film begins promisingly. But its attempt to blend social realism with fantasy in sequences in which Marlena visualises her online beau as present with her (accompanied by jaunty "African" music, natch) proves ill-advised.

Budnik's powerful performance holds the film together, though the shrill climax, which literalises the heroine's position as a trapped woman, is painfully over-extended. Undoubtedly feminist, the film is a bit more problematic when it comes to race issues. The topic of African online scammers is one that Western liberal filmmakers, obsessively dedicated to portraits of Black heroism or victimhood at the moment, would be sure to shy away from, and Ba (an actor known for his work with Warsaw's Teatr Powszechny) manages to bring some subtler shadings to the role later on. But the fact that the only non-white character to feature in the some 17 films I saw at this year's festival is, at base, a negative stereotype indicates (like the brief moment of racist caricaturing that cropped up in Smarzowski's Kler three years ago) that Polish cinema has a long way to go when it comes to effectively broadening its scope of ethnic representation.

As Po miłość and Wszystkie nasze strachy show, the films at FPFF 2021 didn't ignore the contemporary world. Several more took on social topics, such as Michał Otłowski's Lokatorka (The Tenant. You Can't Burn Us All), a blunt critique of "wild privatisation" that uncovers a web of corruption beneath the recent removals of social housing tenants from buildings reclaimed by their owners. The film's highlighting of the disparagement of such tenants as worthless wastrels within capitalist society is certainly well-intentioned (one envisages Ken Loach nodding approval) but the style and execution are basic, to say the least. 

At the other end of the scale of creativity was Filip Jan Rymsza's Mosquito State, an ambitious blend of bio/body horror and corporate black comedy in which the consequences of a mosquito bite become less a threat than a liberation for the socially awkward Wall Street hero (Beau Knapp). Its title evoking both a personal condition and a parasitic social system, the film offers an idiosyncratic origin story for the 2007-2008 financial crisis while also keeping us immersed in its protagonist's freaky headspace. From its leisurely, artfully-designed title sequence onwards, the movie is a trip, and was a deserved winner of the "Visions Apart" and Best Sound prizes. 

Inni Ludzie

Also offering a wild ride of a different kind was Aleksandra Terpińska's  Inni Ludzie (Other People), adapted from Dorota Masłowska's 2018 text. The film brings together Poland's haves and have-nots via the relationship between an aspiring rapper (Jacek Beler, a surprise winner of the Best Actor prize) and his wealthy older lover (Sonia Bohosiewicz), translating Masłowska's language to the screen in the form of an attention-grabbing hip hop musical, complete with narrating Jesus (Sebastian Fabijański).

Frenetic to a fault, Inni Ludzie won many admirers. But some deft touches notwithstanding (those who loved the brief bout of musical muff-diving in Leos Carax's Annette will thrill to several sung-through sex sequences here), I found the film increasingly repellent: obvious in its social points, tonally one-note, and so smugly scuzzy in content that you might feel like a bath afterwards. (The rhymes yield some unintentional comedy, too, at least in their translated form. Sample: "He badly wanted a Lego Space Rover/Would've had a hard-on - if he'd been older.")

Those seeking a more modest take on the musical could find it in the Microbudget Competition, where Tomasz Habowski's Piosenki o miłości (Songs About Love) (the eventual winner of said competition), served up a pleasing confection about a drifting rich boy (Tomasz Włosok) with musical ambitions and the underconfident waitress (Justyna Święs, of The Dumplings) with whom he collaborates after overhearing her sing. Black-and-white for the most part but turning to colour for its social media inserts, the film has plenty of charm, some insight and bite, a nice dash of Nouvelle Vague spirit (as indicated by that Honoré-alluding title), and a brilliant performance from Andrzej Grabowski as the hero's self-regarding actor Dad.

Performance was indeed a pleasure of many of the films at this year's festival, from the great Agata Buzek bringing her vaguely extraterrestrial quality to the part of Jo, an English teacher undergoing entwined personal and professional tensions in Łukasz Grzegorzek's delicious Moje wspaniałe życie (My Wonderful Life) to Maria Dębska's radiant star turn in Bo we mnie jest seks (Autumn Girl), Katarzyna Klimkiewicz's stylised, intermittently enjoyable retro musical about Kalina Jędrusik. Props, too, to the brilliant DP Weronika Bilska, whose cinematography on Everyone Has a Summer I already admired, for her superb work on both of these films and her loving lighting of their heroines. (The in-demand Bilska shot Piosenki o miłości, too!) 

Dialogue not division 

One takeaway from this year's festival was that Polish films currently tend to be reliant upon a journalistic approach, mostly dramatising historical/contemporary events or figures and using the "Based on true events" tag as a stamp of authenticity. (In this context, the cheeky slogan that precedes Bo we mnie jest seks - "The events presented in this film may or may not have happened" - seems quite subversive.)  

This is not an exclusively Polish issue (rather, it may be linked to a wider distrust of "fiction" in our over-mediated age), and it's not necessarily a problem when it yields films of the quality of Leave No Traces. Still, one would hope to see directors letting loose with their imaginations more (in the vein of Mosquito State) and further embracing the expressive potential of the medium. Nonetheless, FPFF 2021's uniting of new and established talents (with a significant number of young or debuting directors in the Main and Microbudget Competitions) and its open attitude were bracing, and bode well for the future of the festival based, in Kolankiewicz's phrase, "on dialogue not division."

The 46th Polish Film Festival took place in Gdynia between 20-25 September 2021.