The 51st Polish Film Festival has opened in the Baltic city of Gdynia, beginning six days of screenings, filmmaker meetings and industry events centred on the latest Polish cinema.
The festival was officially opened on Monday evening at Gdynia’s Danuta Baduszkowa Musical Theatre. The ceremony was followed by Jan Holoubek’s Wild, Wild East, a 105-minute drama set in occupied eastern Poland during the winter of 1943. Festival organisers had previously selected the film as the opening-night title, with a meeting with its filmmakers scheduled after the screening.
Sixteen films are competing in this year’s Main Competition, five of them feature-length directing debuts. Screenings began across Gdynia on Monday morning at venues including the Musical Theatre, the Leszek Kopeć Gdynia Film Centre and the Riviera Centre.
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Among the most internationally recognisable directors in competition is Paweł Pawlikowski, whose Ida won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film in 2015. His new film Fatherland, starring Sandra Hüller, Hanns Zischler, August Diehl and Joanna Kulig, follows German writer Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika on a journey through post-war Germany.
Jan Komasa, whose Corpus Christi was Poland’s submission for the 2019 international feature Oscar race and went on to receive an Academy Award nomination, is competing with Good Boy. The film stars Stephen Graham, Andrea Riseborough and Anson Boon alongside Polish actress Monika Frajczyk.
Agnieszka Smoczyńska, whose The Lure won a World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award at Sundance in 2016, is presenting the science-fiction thriller Hot Spot. The film, starring Andrzej Konopka, Noomi Rapace and Reika Kirishima, imagines a near-future society dominated by an all-encompassing artificial intelligence system.
Other Main Competition filmmakers include Łukasz Palkowski, Kasia Adamik, Janusz Zaorski, Karolina Bielawska, Piotr Domalewski and Łukasz Ronduda, alongside a group of newer directors. The festival’s broader programme includes eight films in the Perspectives competition, 28 shorts and five titles competing for the Janusz Korczak Golden Lion Cubs award for children’s and youth cinema.
This year’s programme also looks back at one of Poland’s most celebrated filmmakers. An exhibition titled Andrzej Wajda: Recollection opened at the Gdynia Film Centre on Monday, while Wajda’s 1979 film The Maids of Wilko — itself once nominated for the Academy Award for foreign-language film — was included in the festival programme.
The Polish Film Festival dates back to 1974, when it was established in Gdańsk before moving permanently to Gdynia after thirteen years. Organisers describe it as one of Europe’s oldest large-scale events devoted specifically to Polish cinema, and its Golden Lions have long served as the festival’s principal award.
The festival runs until Saturday, 26 September. The closing ceremony at the Musical Theatre will reveal the winners of the Golden, Silver and Sapphire Lions as well as individual Main Competition awards.
