Spaces of Freedom: Reflections on the 25th Edition of Fotofestiwal, Łódź (18-28 June, 2026)

"Łódź is a city of contrasts, of four cultures, a promised land. The Polish Manchester. A city of women. A city of Lodzermensch types. A city of transformation and its consequences... It carries a whole range of associations and emotions." (Katarzyna Kończal, curator of the exhibition School of Seeing: The City, Herbst Palace Museum, Łódź, 18 June - 31 December 2026) 

The artistic and cinematic history of the Polish city of Łódź - with it famed film school, and strong links to the avant garde in painting and sculpture - continues to intersect with its post-industrial present in vibrant ways, including in the many cultural events that take place in the city's revitalised spaces. After almost two decades of encounters with the city, I still find myself surprised by it, discovering new facets to a prismatic and often still undervalued place. 

One such event is Fotofestiwal, which celebrated its quarter century this June with a spectacularly packed programme across 10 days. While its primary focus remains photography, the festival also ranges across arts and culture in their widest expressions - film, music, sculpture, performance - dissolving boundaries to create an event that's as inclusive and interdisciplinary as it is international. 

Vive la résistance, Marta Bogdańska ©️ Fotofestiwal

When it was founded in 2001, by students from several different academic disciplines, a decade after the post-communist closure of the city's textile factories had left Łódź at an economic low point, Fotofestiwal was very much an underground endeavour, with films shown from VHS tape and displays created from magazine cut-outs.

Vitamin, Augustin Rebetez.
©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / Augustin Rebetez

Though much changed, expanded and polished since then, the festival still retains something of that raw, punkish energy today. For all the engagement with contemporary political and social ills in the art displayed, a defiant playfulness is also evident - both in the exhibits chosen by director/co-founder Krzysztof Candrowicz and the team of programmers/curators, and also in the city-wide locations in which the work is placed. 

Better 'Magua' Than Pain, Helena Majewska

              ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź/Helena Majewska

Take, for instance, Vitamin, by Augustin Rebetez, a deliriously anarchic combo of kitsch, cats and politics presented in the loft of the Biedermann Palace. Or Helena Majewska's Better 'Magua' Than Pain, a funky but also meditative reflection on Berlin and Warsaw club culture that took over the Machine Room of Fuzja, a historic former power plant, now a mixed-use site of cultural events, restaurants, and residences. 

Eclipse, Adrian Chmielewki
©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / Adrian Chmielewski

Majewska's immersive exhibition was nicely complemented across the city, in the swish Brama Miasta surroundings of PKO Bank Polski's Galeria Koncept, by the display Przesilenie / Eclipse. Presided over by the kind and charismatic music manager, events organiser and concierge Eryk Czyżewski, this display of Adrian Chmielewski's exciting series of photographs taken at music festivals captured moments of artists' performances and revellers' communion with cinematic verve and even some fiery Sirât (2025)-style vibes. 

Meanwhile, the former YMCA swimming pool on Moniuszki Street was startlingly repurposed as a cinema for Kino UTOPIA, an uncanny evocation of past picture palaces as centres of imagination and ideas. Here short films by Taiwanese talents Ying-Ju Chen, Kuang-Yu Tsui, Jui-Chung Yao, and Zi-Fu Chen were screened in the pool, in a concept designed by Paweł Giza, with retro film posters adorning the walls of the upper level. 

Kino Utopia ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź 

More orthodox but still highly rewarding was the School of Seeing: The City display at the Herbst Palace Museum. This is an expansive reflection on 19th and 20th century urban experience and flânerie that transports the viewer from the Polish Manchester of the exhibition's location to Paris, London and other metropolises through carefully curated images and quotes. 

American Cycles, Philip Montgomery ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź, Philip Montgomery

In contrast, American Cycles, the exhibition of Philip Montgomery's photography at the City Art Gallery in Sienkiewicz Park, brought audiences right up to date with its focus on recent and ongoing US traumas, from the opioid crisis to BLM protests. The first time that the work of Montgomery, a regular contributor to publications including The New York Times, has been presented in Poland, the black-and-white images also brought intimacy to celebrated subjects, from amusingly startled Supreme Court Justices to Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, gently head to head. 

American Cycles, Philip Montgomery ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / Philip Montgomery 

A street over, at Re:Medium Gallery on Piotrkowska, Izabela Łapińska's American Beauty collated the Polish photographer and filmmaker's portraits of individuals whom Łapińska had encountered on New York streets. With special attention to the subjects' lips, the exhibit offered a warm, affirmative display of US diversity. 

Pig, Feng Li @Fotofestiwal Łódź / Feng Li

Alongside the aforementioned Biedermann Palace, the festival's other central hub was at Art_Inkubator, the former complex of textile warehouses close to Fuzja, where the main programme was presented. Here the festival's central theme of relations between human and animals was most prominently in evidence. 

Memorable highlights included Pig, Feng Li's subversive take on domestication: a photographic document of family life with an ever-growing porker and other adopted animals in a Chengdu apartment that suggested a Chinese counterpart to Malcom Mowbray's A Private Function (1984). The photos in Vive la résistance, by Marta Bogdańska, hilariously and pointedly gave the gaze back to various animal subjects. Nikita Teryoshin's Backyard Diaries, meanwhile, was a moving, gritty display of photos of street cats from across the world: a sometimes painful but also vital antidote to Instagramable cuteness. 

 I'll Bet the Devil My Head, Carlos Alba ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / Carlos Alba

Also asking tough questions about human/animal relations in an urban context, this time through a fable-like form, was Carlos Alba's I'll Bet the Devil My Head. Here photos of urban foxes prowling the London borough of Tower Hamlets were juxtaposed with images of city brokers to evoke the capital's wealth disparities.

Flipping the Bird,
Jaap Scheeren/Rik van den Bos  ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / Jaap Scheeren

Jaap Scheeren and Rik van den Bos contributed Flipping the Bird, a brilliant 15 minute short film, or "photo novel," based around a walk across the Dutch dunes. As the journey progresses, pastoral rapture gives way to a subversive rebuttal from nature's perspective. By turns reflective, irreverent, sexy, meditative, confrontational, laugh-out-loud funny and profound, this was among my favourite exhibits of the festival. Do yourself a favour and watch it here. 

Luke Stephenson, An Incomplete History of Show Birds ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź 

A sometime collaborator of Scheeren's, Luke Stephenson brought his delightful An Incomplete History of Show Birds to the festival, an example of the photographer's heartening attention to the more eccentric, arcane and undersung elements of British culture. The pictures looked at once sweetly enticing and quite imposing in their outdoor display at Schiller's Passage on Piotrkowska Street, where the city's own birds could be counted among the exhibit's charmed spectators. 

The festival's biggest coup was surely its opening event, again held at Fuzja, and this time based around an unexpected collaboration. John Akomfrah's Listening All Night to the Rain was the celebrated artist-filmmaker's commissioned contribution to the 2024 Venice Biennale's British Pavilion. 

A further development of Akomfrah's series of collectively devised multi-screen film installations, Listening All Night to the Rain has been seen in a couple of iterations since its Venice premiere: at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, and, currently, at Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery.

 

The Fotofestiwal presentation of the piece was entirely unique, however, in boasting new music composed to the images by Hania Rani (a recent winner at the European Film Awards for her soundtrack to Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value [2025]). This was performed live by Rani on piano and cymbals at Fuzja. 

Listening All Night to the Rain ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź/ John Akomfrah 

This surprising audiovisual synthesis proved highly effective and quite emotional. Since his breakthrough film, Handsworth Songs (1986), Akomfrah's tender and radical works, combining freshly filmed images with others drawn from archives, have always boasted extremely intricate soundscapes of their own; they may not seem to require further sonic intervention. Here, though, some of the original sounds could be heard faintly beneath Rani's live playing, creating another layer, a kind of audio palimpsest, that added to the richness and surprise of the images. 

Listening All Night to the Rain ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / John Akomfrah

The presentation of the piece as a 30 minute work on 8 screens meant that its original scope (which included around 30 hours of footage across 60 screens in 8 rooms in Venice) was considerably reduced. But Akomfrah's fluid, associative, haptic imagery - of drowned clocks and dancing bodies, ticking metronomes and James Baldwin on the telephone, political protests and pre-Raphaelite paintings - still offered plenty to absorb, with Rani's playing a by turns rapturous, delicate and discordant addition. 

Listening All Night to the Rain ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / John Akomfrah

Akomfrah's bricolage filmmaking has always sought connections between apparently disparate aspects of the world. And with the screens fading in and out on the faces of different human subjects, suggesting a relay of experiences both deeply private and collective, this iteration of Listening All Night to the Rain wonderfully evoked the idea of each individual as a living archive of memories and incidents. For all the histories of oppression and crises they gesture towards, Akomfrah's recent works have a deeply cleansing, spiritual impact, and the new music accentuated that effect. "We might do it again," said Rani, of the performance. Let's hope so. 

American Beauty, Izabela Łapińska  ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / Izabela Łapińska

Akomfrah - whose first visit to Łódź this was but who, in his brief introduction to the performance, called the city a "mecca" for students of his generation - has described an important aspect of his work as "creating spaces of freedom" for audiences. In its remarkable range and its democratic showcasing of work by global artists - both those long established and those newly emerging - this year's anniversary edition of Fotofestiwal offered many such liberating, challenging and inspiring spaces for its attendees. The above remarks cover only a fraction of the festival's abundance of riches - its at times overwhelming array of events and exhibits, concerts, workshops, and talks. This unique and exhilarating festival continues to grow and evolve, and showcases Łódź at its best and most inclusive. Here's to the next 25 years.

Fotofestiwal took place in Łódź between 18-28 June 2026. However, some of the exhibits, including several mentioned above, continue to be displayed throughout the year. Further details here. 

In Form: A Report on the 14th International Retroperspektywy Theatre Festival (21- 31 August 2025, Łódź)

 

Under the title "Awakenings," last year's Retroperspektywy Festival (RPS) celebrated the 20th anniversary of the festival's founder, Teatr CHOREA, initially by looking backwards. The opening event, What's Demeter?, was a compendium show that revisited scenes and songs from some of the company's previous productions. 

Dzień Dobry, Pinky Mouse! during What's Demeter? (RPS, 2024)

The result was sensational: a 3 hour rollercoaster ride that highlighted the depth and range of CHOREA's work in music, drama, and movement across two decades, and which reunited artists associated with the group's past and present. The show was full of surprises and delights; audience-inclusive from the start, it culminated in a magical moment of interaction that danced audience and performers out of the auditorium together. 

Ragnarok during What's Demeter? (RPS, 2024)

Supplementing its customary mix of performances, concerts, workshops, discussions and exhibitions with some fresh elements, this year's just-concluded edition of RPS took "In Form" as its title - as a theme, as an inquiry, and as a challenge. In the words of the organisers: "What does it mean to be in sha­pe, in form, to­day - in a world of over-sti­mu­la­tion, ten­sion and trans­for­ma­tion? Ar­ti­sts from dif­fe­rent co­un­tries an­swer the qu­estion: what form does the­atre take to­day, in the face of cri­sis, so­cial chan­ges and tech­no­lo­gi­cal re­vo­lu­tion?" The festival programme provided responses - as well as further questions - of all kinds.

Ubu Roi

If a warm, embracing tone defined What's Demeter?, the opening show of this year's festival was - in keeping with the idea of challenge - a more confrontational proposition, though one that generated plenty of audience laughter throughout. Premiered in 1896 when the author was just 23, Alfred Jarry's absurdist precursor Ubu Roi at least partially demonstrated its enduring ability to provoke in Konrad Dworakowski's production (eccentrically designed by the director and Marika Wojciechowska), a collaboration between CHOREA and Grupa Coincidentia. 

Ubu Roi

Dworakowski's staging leant hard into the play's Rabelaisian vision and scatological humour - existence as a cycle of consumption and excretion - as well as its parodic elements of Shakespearean tragedy, and its Polish provenance and afterlife. (Translated in 1936 by Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, the play was adapted as an opera buffa by Krzysztof Penderecki in the early 1990s.) The production also found plenty of topical political resonances without semaphoring them - at least until Ukrainian and Palestinian flags were brandished by the cast at the curtain call. 

Ubu Roi

Jarry's play remains clearly a young man's work, and for those for whom a little caricature and absurdism goes a long way, the evening had its lags, failing to match the kind of magnetic synthesis of elements that Dworakowski previously achieved with his great stagings of Bruno Schulz material, Schulz: Skrawki and Schulz: Pętla. 

Ubu Roi

Still, there's no denying the distinctiveness of the production's puppetry-and-punk aesthetic, or the commitment of the company, from the counter-intuitively cast Paweł Chomczyk as a decidedly un-obese Ubu, to Dagmara Sowa as the grasping, acquisitive spouse, plus CHOREA stalwarts Joanna Chmielecka and Janusz Adam Biedrzycki as Byczysław and Król Wacław/Queen Rosamund respectively, and the Belarusian actor Siarhei Artsiomenka as Captain Bardior. 

 Divny Sad exhibition, Ana­sta­sia Ry­dle­vskaya

Work by Belarusian creatives was in fact an integral component of this year's festival. It was a poignant one, too, since several of the featured artists have settled in Poland after fleeing Lukashenko's Belarus, and reflect on the experience of exile in their work in contrasting but equally creative ways. 

Snake Charmer

Ana­sta­sia Ry­dle­vskaya, now based in Gdańsk, not only contributed the art exhibition “Di­vny Sad” (“Won­der­ful Gar­den”) to RPS, and designed masks for the Tylko dla dziewczyn (Just for Girls) events; she also delivered a terrific outdoor concert performance, mostly drawing on material from her third album, Snake Charmer (listen here).  

Snake Charmer

Quiet and modest in her demeanour during the festival's opening speeches, Ry­dle­vskaya proved a distinctively bold artist both in her vivid, striking paintings, often evoking instances of painful or productive me­ta­mor­pho­sis, and in her performance style, which combined playful energy and shamanic intensity, as it took place outside, under the (very appropriate) Black Moon of the festival's first Saturday night. 

DJ Papa Bo Selectah

Alongside Papa Bo Selectah, who delivered a dynamic DJ set, a third Belarusian artist mobilising music was Igor Shu­ga­le­ev, whose Ich he­iße Frau Trof­fea (My Name is Mrs. Trof­fea), a solo dance performance created with director Ser­gey Sha­bo­hin, proved an explosive highlight of the festival's first Sunday afternoon. 

Ich he­iße Frau Trof­fea 

Premiered at Teatr Nowy in Warsaw in 2022, Sha­bo­hin and Shu­ga­le­ev's piece fuses present-tense immediacy and historical awareness as it links Shu­ga­le­ev's experience of the Berlin rave scene to the mysterious "dance plague" that began in 1518, when one Frau Troffea began to dance frantically in the Strasbourg streets, apparently inspiring hundreds of other citizens to do the same over several days, resulting in many deaths. 

Ich he­iße Frau Trof­fea 

The overall structure of Ich he­iße Frau Trof­fea is that of a club night in microcosm. Shu­ga­le­ev enters wet-haired and nude, and proceeds to dress himself for the night's partying, as phone footage of Belarusian political protests and his own journey out of the country are projected on the screen behind. 

Ich he­iße Frau Trof­fea 

Across the following 30 minutes, Agniesz­ka Kryst's choreography then takes the performer from little more than a leg twitch into a violent crescendo of movements and contortions that are by turns disturbing and cathartic, and accompanied by pounding techno courtesy of Mi­ki­ta Bu­ba­sh­kin & Gray Mandorla Studio, and To­masz Jóź­win's high intensity strobe lighting.

Ich he­iße Frau Trof­fea 

With Troffea herself also visualised on the screen in one section in images that add a spectral silent cinema dimension to the show, the piece draws a throughline between the dance plague and contemporary rave culture, presenting both as manifestations of rebellion by marginalised social groups. 

Ich he­iße Frau Trof­fea 

Historically dubious as this connection might be, it proves powerful in performance, as the show reimagines Troffea's action not in terms of medical pathology but rather as an expression of a resisting, revolutionary spirit that still abides today as a challenge to oppression. 

Tomasz Rodowicz during Hoson Zes / Lśnij  

While Troffea twirled in the intimate confines of Fabryka Sztuki's Sala A_22 auditorium, this year's RPS was also characterised by, in the words of CHOREA's Artistic Director Tomasz Rodowicz, "a search for innovative forms in the performing arts that open up new ways of engaging with audiences." 

Pipe Up

This involved using some different spaces for events - from the neighbouring Fuzja complex where the Norwegian company Panta Rei Danseteater presented their delightful and quietly visionary family show Pipe Up at the former power plant, to the appearance of two trailers in the Fabryka Sztuki courtyard, one which became home to Te­atr Com­pa­gnia Sa­mo­var's Of­fi­ci­na Oce­ano­gra­fi­ca Sen­ti­men­ta­le, the other to Teatr Łątek Supraśl's Nosferatu - a Diary of the Plague. 

Night Piece N° 7

By far the most experimental of the festival's offerings was Night Piece N°7 by Stuttgart's O-Team theatre group. Fresh from a recent presentation in South Africa, the piece takes the form of an all-night self-described "meditation ritual" which aims to keep participants in a liminal state between sleeping and waking across 11 hours, blending ob­ject the­atre, installation, con­cert, per­for­man­ce and sta­ged exhi­bi­tion elements - all with the bonus of a shared breakfast in the morning. 

Happy Hour

Other visiting shows pushed formal boundaries in less extreme but nonetheless striking ways. The Czech director/designer Jan Mo­cek's Happy Hour developed into  a strangely compulsive relay of creation and destruction through the movement and (re-)stacking of 150 squeaky Styrofoam panels. These were transformed by the show's sometimes focused, somnambulant, distracted or disruptive trio (Tin­ka Avra­mo­va, Iri­na An­dre­eva, Ar­se­niy Mi­khay­lov) into various simulacra: a stack of books, a graveyard, a mountain, a monument.

Glory Game

Best of all, perhaps, was Te­atr Ko­mu­na War­sza­wa/Sticky Fingers Club's Glory Game, conceived and choreographed by Do­mi­nik Wię­cek. The show opened with its performers, Da­nie­la Ko­mę­de­ra, Do­mi­ni­ka Wiak, Mo­ni­ka Wit­kow­ska, Na­ta­lia Din­ges, Piotr Sta­nek, and Wię­cek, as dignified physical icons - noble and naked, a collective running back and forth in slow motion - before deconstructing that vision to reveal the often absurd aspects of competition and the contemporary mediatisation of sport. The piece's revelation of a sneaky, humourous side was delightful; the performers' physical control and expressiveness was breathtaking; and the concept felt fully realised, offering completely fresh, funny, exciting and subversive solutions to the staging of sport. 

A Ty jak to wi­dzisz?

The CHOREA Youth Group premiered a "demonstration" performance of A Ty jak to wi­dzisz? (And how do you see it?). Directed and choreographed­ by Ja­nusz Adam Bie­drzyc­ki and Anna Ma­szew­ska, this proved to be a lively, affectionate and often hilarious piece inspired by Do­ro­ta Kas­sja­no­wicz's book 30 zni­ka­ją­cych tram­po­lin (30 Disappearing Trampolines) which presents the titular object in multiple short scenes; these vary wildly in perspective, tone and genre. The show will return in a full production in November, and deserves to be widely seen.

 

Sta­ra ko­bie­ta wy­sia­du­je 

Meanwhile, the veteran stage actress Irena Jun received a loving reception and delivered a tour de force performance in Tadeusz Ró­że­wicz's 1968 play Sta­ra ko­bie­ta wy­sia­du­je (The Old Woman Broods), here distilled and reconceived as a monodrama but with its metaphor of a monstrous garbage dump to describe the crisis of today's civilization still sadly resonant. Ta­de­usz Wie­lec­ki complemented Jun's vocal dexterity and supple command of the text with music played live, while old video footage of the actress and Ró­że­wicz in conversation made for a poignant opening to the intimate and charged performance.

The Dzi­dzias

All of the concerts were of a high standard, and ranged from the sensuous sound of Karakal, fronted by the charismatic Turkey-born lyricist/vocalist Ayşe Abacı, through the punchy, progressive indie rock of The Dzi­dzias, to the off-kilter energy of the Ballady i Romanse concert by Ewa Żurakowska and Horsy. This set Adam Mickiewicz poems to thunderous drums and proggy arrangements, delivered with pleasingly uninhibited vocals, theatrical flair and encouraged singalongs by Żurakowska. 

Grze­gorz Wierus during Hoson Zes / Lśnij

As often - 2023's LIVET: Suite for the Earth will live long in the memories of those who were lucky enough to see it - the festival concluded with a concert as well. Hoson Zes / Lśnij was the debut of CHOREA's new Chór Spół­dziel­czy (Cooperative Choir), made up of a mix of novice and experienced singers. Conducted jointly by Grze­gorz Wierus and Elina Toneva the choir presented a deeply stirring performance of Ancient Greek music - a fitting finale for a festival in which dialogue between past and present cultural expressions stood out as a vital aspect. 

Hoson Zes / Lśnij

The above remarks focus on only a selection of highlights of RPS 2025. Thanks to the efforts of this year's main coordinator, Ola Shaya, and team, this edition of the festival felt particularly packed. It also sustained momentum, with careful attention paid to the themes and sequencing of each individual day, and with room for fun details - such as surprise cameos from Julia Jakubowska's wonderfully frenetic 80s-styled fitness instructor. 

Julia Jakubowska

Like many other attendees, I'm sure, I invariably leave RPS feeling changed "on a cellular level" (as certain Americans currently like to put it...): challenged and expanded intellectually and with a sense of inhabiting one's body more fully, purposefully and presently. At once playing to its strengths as a festival and broadening its horizons, 2025 found Retroperspektywy in exceptionally good form. 

Photos by Agnieszka Czytacka fotografia

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.