Discoveries from Poland World Cinema

Stand up comedy show of Abelard Giza.

An eccentric, philosophical story, in which the boundary between absurdity and existential reflections blurs in an inapparent way. The protagonist, deliberating her sister's exceptionally tiny hands, ponders about alternative modes of her sister's existence - for example as a pigeon.

The film enters into a dialogue with biographism as a method of interpreting art, while also showing that it is impossible to escape biographism entirely. Its creators recognize the value in the attitude of avant-garde artists, which lay in overcoming life’s adversities and pushing their imagination beyond what others consider an insurmountable horizon. In this film, nothing is as it actually happened—and this not-happening is intentional. By watching situations that never took place, we can draw conclusions about the things that did. The viewer steps into the role of a detective, because a crime has been committed in this story. Among the suspects are: Fanny Kaplan, who attempted to take Lenin’s life; Fritz Haber, the father of chemical warfare, and his wife, who took her own life in despair; as well as the cities Paris, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Łódź.

This is a film about an extraordinary woman - Wanda Rutkiewicz. Important for Polish and world Himalayan mountaineering. Some like her, others do not want to talk about her. We decided to tell the story of her path through life - from the beginning to today. Because even though she was lost in the Himalayas many years ago - she still evokes emotions.

Deported to Siberia after the Russian invasion on Eastern Europe in 1939, Jakub (11) has only one idea in mind: return home to Poland. Thus begins his odyssey, through the Russian gulag, Taiga and soviet Uzbekistan, from childhood to adulthood.

Experimental short film by Józef Robakowski.

A film consisting of two shots recorded by a camera mounted on a lorry driving through Brooklyn, New York. At the beginning, in the foreground, we see a woman with a camera leaning against the roof of the vehicle, behind her the urban landscape of a run-down neighbourhood flashes by. The camera is mobile, gradually moving from the woman towards the direction of travel, showing an intersection of narrow streets and a cherry-coloured car, which it then follows. We hear the sounds of the surroundings and the creaking of the lorry. The title card appears, followed by the first notes of a song sung off-screen. The song hummed by the author is the pre-war tango ‘Pamiętasz Capri’ from Mieczysław Fogg's repertoire. It is the soundtrack for the second shot showing the viaduct with the expressway. The camera is positioned with its back to the direction of travel, and we see cars driving behind the lorry and heavy traffic on the street, reminiscent of classic shots from American films.

Andrzej Strumiłło's reflections about his life and work.

Andrei is a man who has lost everything. Volha, his wife, has lost everything too. They lost it all when they emigrated to a foreign country. They can’t manage to build a new life. They live in their memories.

Several true stories from the 1930s about Stalin’s repressions. One of them tells about a Gomel official who survived an execution in the infamous Novobelitsky (Chonkovsky) forest near Gomel.

Damian’s grandmother Aniela grew up surrounded by nature – the forest, the changing seasons, and helping her parents with the farm work. Aniela was the oldest of four children, and often went to the forest alone. Done in claymation, this is the story of what the now-elderly Aniela encountered in the forest and still remembers to this day.

“Today, when I know what has come out of it, I can say that making my short movie, I immersed myself into Here and Now, or rather There and Then. After all, it’s been nearly three months. Even I find it amazing that I turned the camera by 180 degrees in my professional life.” – Jacek Borcuch.

A little witch living in a mountain village is one day sentenced to execution by a greedy monk living there. She is inadvertently rescued by a vampire who lives in a tower in the middle of the forest. A friendship develops between the two. The film talks about the necessity of doing good and forgiveness, and warns against judging a book by its cover.

A moving Polish-Japanese story about the meeting of two worlds, brought together through Chopin’s music and youthful fascination. The story of Sebastian from Warsaw and Aiko from Hamamatsu begins in the 1990s and, years later, returns against the backdrop of the Chopin Competition in contemporary Poland’s capital. This is a film about the power of memories, dreams, and art that can transcend the boundaries of language, culture, and time.

A film awarded the main prize in the documentary category at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. The picture depicts the everyday life of Vietnamese people.

It's a full-length documentary about the problems of Upper Silesian identity today and attempts to protect what remained after years of Germanization and later Polonization of Upper Silesia.

Ukraine, 2022. Kherson is under Russian occupation. A son involved in the armed underground visits his mother to find out whether she has revealed his location to the Russians. The woman believes the occupation is a form of salvation and that everyone should cooperate. Their argument takes an unexpected turn when the son decides to leave.

A Polish documentary presenting a sequence of hidden-camera footage, interviews and archival clips to depict what it claims is a coordinated campaign by LGBTQ-rights activists to infiltrate and reshape the fabric of society. Against the backdrop of a national election, it suggests that equality marches across Poland are part of a well-funded network, with participants paid to travel between towns and supported by foreign interests. The narrative frames this as a threat to children, religion, family values and the nation’s future. Local authorities and media sympathetic to queer causes are portrayed as complicit, while the movement is likened to propaganda and moral corruption. The film positions LGBTQ activism not as a struggle for rights but as an organized ideological “invasion” seeking to alter traditions, institutions and laws, even implying an intent to normalize paedophilia. Selective imagery and rhetoric turn civil society expression into a supposed existential threat.

Propaganda film promoting the Constitution of the People’s Republic of Poland, effective July 22, 1952, emphasizing Article 62’s guarantee of cultural access and participation. It highlights widespread newspaper and literature circulation, extensive day-care centers and libraries, and open palaces for art appreciation. Realist painting is contrasted with American press and tabloid literature, using jazzy music. Polish publications focus on peace and prosperity, while workers engage in cultural creation through theaters and community groups. The film uses strong contrasts and voiceover, ignoring cultural policy failures.

Unique scenes from the early postwar reality of the capital city in footage taken by an unknown cameraman.

"I moved to the Beskids because they are beautiful, and several years of experience have confirmed my belief that it was a brilliant idea," said Andrzej Stasiuk, a resident of the village of Czarne near Dukla in the Podkarpacie region for fifteen years, in a recent interview. He knows life in the provinces inside out, having described it many times in his prose and columns. He has experienced its good and bad sides, its problems and shameful corners firsthand.

Among the residents are mentally disabled and autistic people. Most of them are single. "The name day party must be held in splendor and glory. So that the director likes it and is happy with you," the group's caregiver oversees the entire artistic program. The routine and monotony are interrupted by preparations for the name day. And then... everyday life returns. Routine and monotony.

At the end of Gdynia there is a small fishing settlement. A young angler is dreaming about working as his father and grandfather did. A few seasons of fishing with his father made him realise that this dream may never come true.

A film story about a group of musicians from Poland and Sweden who, led by Janusz Prusinowski, met at the end of 2015 to realize a year-long Polish-Swedish musical project. The starting point was joint work on repertoire, musical conversation, searching for answers, similar motifs and musical themes, and an attempt to create material for a joint album.

A portrait of three women of different ages who work together. Sorting coal in the Rydultowy Hard Coal Mine is a tough job, but the heroines are examples of fortitude. Unfortunately, their daily struggles are not limited to moving raw materials, but also concern the most mundane matters - such as fighting with mining officials over cleaning toilet cabins. Sometimes their only weapon turns out to be a sense of dignity and an equally important sense of humor.

Elżbieta Jodłowska, author of the play Climacterium i już (Menopause and Now), decided that she would break another taboo. She created a two-hour-long tragic farce about hot flashes, skin spots, obesity, attacks of hysteria, failing memory and fading libido. She enriched the show with songs and dance. The performances are received with standing ovations.

Director Krzysztof Zanussi's collaboration with Wojciech Kilar was a worldwide phenomenon. The artists' paths had already converged in the 1960s, and were not to part until Kilar's death. The composer wrote music to the young filmmaker's debut picture Struktura kryształu / The Structure of Crystals (1969), and Zanussi was so impressed with both the soundtrack and Kilar's understanding and general savvy that he kept submitting his artistic proposals only to him. As a result this outstanding duo completed over forty feature films, as well as documentaries and television works. In a short story by Krzysztof Zanussi we learn more about this unique, long-term cooperation.

She would like to return as a little bird in the next life, small enough to hide. Right now she still lives in a bird cage, at the mercy of the whims of a fate that transported her and her family from Myanmar to a refugee village in the Thai jungle. The rain drums ceaselessly on the roof. The torrential river in front of the house is as powerful as the suppressed feelings of a woman who gave birth to 12 children and lost some of them. She hasn’t chosen her husband; moreover, he sometimes flies away. Now she only hopes that her daughter will follow.

Working the boggy meadows at the river Biebrza are the titular last mowers, passing on the tradition of mowing the grass by hand to a sparse handful of successors. Here, long contemplative shots of unique wildlife make the human order merge with the order of nature.

Wiera Gran was a popular Polish-Jewish singer who managed to survive the Holocaust. However, all of her later life was doomed due to the accusation of being a Nazi collaborator in the Warsaw Ghetto. Was she really a traitor?

The security services of the People's Republic of Poland controlled several tens of millions of letters every year. Every day, specialized units were engaged in peeling off envelopes, reading and analyzing private correspondence, which resulted in reports on social moods. The letters written during the whole period of the People's Republic of Poland - intimate, full of pain and despair, but also those with threats to power, and also those more pragmatic ones, in order to do something, became the tissue for building a poignant internal portrait of the Poles in the People's Republic of Poland - were the basis for the creation of a moving portrait of Poles in the People's Republic of Poland. The film is composed of unique archival materials.

Together with the crew, Paweł Kędzierski managed to record the statements of nine cichociemni, including the only woman from this distinguished group - Elżbieta Zawacka, pseudonym "Zo". Two of the film's characters did not live to see its premiere. Neither of them is alive today. Thus, the documentary managed to capture for posterity the memories of the last living cichociemni, which gave it historical value.

The visualisation simulating the camera movement guides the viewer through minimalist interiors featuring paintings that were also on display at the gallery. Then, we witness a change into an abstract space, filled with shapes generated and controlled by crowd simulation software.

Before Dietrich and Garbo, there was Negri. This documentary explores the life of legendary actress Pola Negri, the first European star in America, who paved the way for future icons. It delves into her dramatic life, including engagements to Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino, and features interviews with notable figures like Hayley Mills and Eli Wallach. The film showcases her range from silent films to talkies and black and white to color.

A documentary about the re-enactment of the Stanford Prison Experiment - a famous psychological experiment studying human behaviour in prison conditions, conducted in 1971 by Professor Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University in California. In early 2005 the artistic radical Artur Zmijewski took the risk of reconstructing Professor Zimbardo's experiment in Warsaw. He tried to recreate precisely the architecture of the simulated prison and its rules. Seven "prisoners" and nine "guards" were selected in a procedure aimed at eliminating mentally unstable candidates. They were offered $40 a day for their role in the experiment. The rooms were equipped with one-way mirrors, and the course of the experiment was filmed by five man-operated cameras and several night vision-enabled industrial TV cameras. In the process, Zmijewski pierces through societal masks and travels to the heart of mankind, where it is still dark.

The Association of Theatrical Practices Gardzienice was founded in 1976 by Wlodzimierz Staniewski in a village near Lublin, which remains the group's headquarters to this day. Staniewski had just finished a five-year period of collaboration with Jerzy Grotowski’s Teatr Laboratorium. The group does create theatrical productions, but its main work is to conduct research into folk culture, as well as ethnic and anthropological studies. Members of the group take part in expeditions. There the shape of future productions is formed, productions which are evolving more and more closely towards modern mystery plays, restoring tragedy from the spirit of music. In this documentary, the process of the very particular "ethno-theatrical" expeditions that Gardzienice Centre was making in the past is portrayed. It shows the preparation, the way that the interactions with local communities happened, and how the material that was collected later informed them during the creation of performances.

Disco polo, the most popular as well as criticised music genre of 1990s Poland, is discussed in this film by its creators and major stars.

The story of Kantor’s life, including artist’s drawings and fragments from his private diary.

A psychological portrait of Tadeusz Perzina, a man who, having lived through a period of poverty and hunger in his youth, vowed to himself that one day he would become president and never starve again. This dream became an obsession. Producing food became the main focus of Perzina's activities. While raising pigs, he pondered the necessity of waste disposal as one of the links in the food production process. In the film, Tadeusz Perzyna presents his views on the world around him.

“What is the policy of burying particularly distinguished people? – asks the manager of the municipal cemetery. First of all, you have to be guided by the honest attitude of a party member - he replies after a moment. These and other similar "reflections on the passing of time" give an answer to how one should have lived in the communist system in order to deserve a burial place in the alley of the distinguished (or at least in the alley of the "meritorious").

A short displaying the process of manufacturing and assembling a Fiat 126P in Poland, a so-called "maluch".

The interweaving of the book (Chłopi, "Peasants") and the actual reality of the time in Lipce Reymontowskie. What transformations occurred in the villagers under the influence of their participation in the realization of the series "Peasants" (1972), an adaptation of the book?

Reportage from Uppland, a center of settlement and power for the former Swedish tribes.

Ethnographic reportage on the life of the Kurpie people, a population of Mazurian origin, living in the wilderness areas in the basin of the lower Narew River and its tributaries, a tough, talented people, skillful craftsmen and versatile artists. The documentary consists of their statements and reportage photos showing their working time.

The documentary explains the basic principles of filming a scene in general, medium and close-up.

The film shows the flora and fauna of Spitsbergen. It turns out that - despite extremely low temperatures - there are about 140 kinds of flower plants. Although the region is very inhospitable for humans, the author managed to capture on film many strange natural phenomena.

A documentary about a small island in the Glacial Ocean, which during the Arctic summer becomes a kingdom of singing birds.

A film depicting traditional highland dances and the charm of the Podhale landscape. The filmmaker, Eugeniusz Cękalski, was associated with the environment of the film avant-garde, hence the use of treatments unusual for a documentary film. "Highland Dances" is not only a recording of folk dancing, but above all an artistic reportage, showing dancers from different perspectives, using close-ups showing the beauty of regional costumes neatly interspersed with views of the Tatra outdoors. The film featured the Dance Ensemble of the Folk Theater Association.

A reportage of the official ceremony join Upper Silesia to Poland iin 1922. The film shows the General Szeptycki and Speaker of the Seimas Trąmpczyński in Katowice, meeting with government officials, mass, speeches, signing to join the act, the parade of delegations from all over the country and the military parade on the streets of Katowice.