Poland

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December 1989. Jan Wysocki (Wojciech Wysocki), a former Wrocław oppositionist, becomes a member of the Senate committee to settle the activities of the communist secret service. In order to stop him, a group of Escorts hit his family. As a result, Marek (Jan Frycz), Wysocki’s younger brother, is severely beaten to a rubbish dump. Here, fate will meet him with the eccentric “Frenchwoman” (Krystyna Janda). Together they will create a pair of outsiders: he doesn’t know who she is, she lives in her own Paris – they both need each other.Read More »

A con man (Piotr Fronczewski) gets out of jail and is soon up to his old tricks. He starts small, but his grifts quickly grow more elaborate and far-reaching, until he’s entangled all manner of local politicians and government ministers in his chicanery, culminating with his grand impersonation of an Austrian diplomat. Miroslaw Bork’s dry-witted Polish comedy won the Best Director award at the San Sebastian International Film Festival in 1989.Read More »

The visualization of a day in the life of an alcoholic, teeming with images of anxiety and Kafkaesque paranoia. Adapted from Marek Hlasko’s novel The First Step in the Clouds, THE NOOSE is movie as delirium tremens, as a young man escapes his cramped flat to wander from bar to bar, unable to escape the trap of isolation. THE NOOSE tightens as Kuba, nearly saved by the love of a good woman, dives deeper into hallucinatory intoxication.Read More »

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A film showing the social mood and tensions in the period between the end of the strikes in August 1980 and the registration of the Solidarity Trade Union in November 1980.

The film won awards, among others:
1981 – Kraków (Kraków Film Festival – Polish Competition; until 2000 National Short Film Festival) – “Bronze Lajkonik” Award in the documentary film category for Bohdan KosińskiRead More »

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In 1976 Kieslowski produced Hospital, the 1977 winner of the Festival of Short
Films in Krakow. The film deals with Warsaw orthopaedic surgeons who are portrayed working long, 32-hour shifts. The camera follows them in the operating theatre, admittance room and smoky offices. They are portrayed as struggling with faulty equipment and overcoming fatigue. The film focuses on everyday hospital situations without any voice-over comments, with the passage of time carefully indicated every hour. The surgeons are portrayed as skilled workers in this, to use Kieslowski’s words, ‘film about some brotherhood’.
– Marek Haltof, The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski – Variations on Destiny and Chance, 2006Read More »

A pristine transport-stream recording of Jan Jakub Kolski’s beautiful early short film, Ładny dzień. Whilst his subsequent works are enjoyable, none have the same visual brilliance found here. One suspects that Kolski perhaps now views the work as immature, given that it’s so heavily influenced by Tarkovsky, but there’s a singular vision here that’s very special. The expressive use of colour, framing and montage is utterly captivating, and the beauty of the screenshots is self-evident.Read More »

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A war drama showing the functioning of Hitler’s “racial purity” law, forbidding foreign workers from any contact with Germany. Foreigners on forced labor in Nazi Germany. Death, imprisonment or stigmatization awaited both sides for closer contacts with the Germans. A Pole, Władysław, and a widow and her daughter Linda, another Pole for an affair with a German girl, two American prisoners of war and a German woman who gave birth to a child to one of them, a German soldier who met his dream girl in a foreigner, Marice.Read More »

Two scientists are placed in hibernation and should be awaken after three years. But when they wake up, it turns out that it has been fifty years, and they are the only two males in a new, underground society composed exclusively of women.Read More »

Poland, during the World War. Lotna is a magnificent specimen of Arabian horse, the
pride of her owner, too old to actually ride her but to whom she remains faithful
nevertheless. The Polish cavalry army is also proud of their land, and loyal to rules, and
custom. The German army is leading an overwhelming speed attack with tanks, an
almost unheard of weapon, and bringing a way of life to an end. It’s the last battle
between Lotna (speed horse) and Blitzkriega (speed war).Read More »