Discoveries from Poland World Cinema

A story about two childhood friends who are reunited by fate. This reunion after many years becomes an opportunity for a melancholy journey into the past, to recall memories of an irrevocable time gone by, as well as to reflect on true happiness, new values and the meaning of life. The plot of the film takes place as if on two time planes: on the screen, contemporary events are intertwined with images from years ago, when the heroines were still very young and the adult world seemed so distant.

Trying to check out a recording from his debut album, a street rapper and his friend run into trouble when a major drug deal turns into a total disaster for them.

How to live in a shadow of an empire? How can you think about the future if all that you see through the window are barbed wires, armoured vehicles and tanks? Aleksey from Nagorno-Karabakh, Timur from Ukraine, and Alexander from Georgia are facing these questions every day. These three men differ in almost every aspect of their lives, but in fact, each of them experiences the same consequences for their very existence. Each one of them experiences war. We observe people involved in the already forgotten border conflicts, that happened after the USSR collapse, and are still alive due to the Russian imperial policy.

Alfred and Jerzy take part in a brutal incident: during a train ride, a couple of hooligans harass a young woman. Jerzy stands in her defense. Alfred hesitates and becomes a helpless bystander as his younger brother is thrown off the moving train. 'Courage' is about people whose lives get disturbed by a violent act, which forces them to reveal who they really are.

Can we see the face of the invisible God? On the Veil of Manoppello and the Shroud of Turin, did the Savior leave us His image? Did Jesus want us to be able to see the Divine Face already here on earth? We see people who for the Face of Jesus change their lives, do great works and humbly serve others. We discover the multifaceted spirituality of mystics who built it on special veneration of the Divine Face, saints who saw great value in contemplating the face of the Savior. "The Face of Jesus" ceases to be an ordinary film story. It becomes an encounter for the viewer! Look into the eyes of God, let yourself be captivated by His gaze and feel His love.

To instil a gloomy atmosphere, a Chinese film crew decides to shoot a heartbreaking drama in a Polish village and invite the locals to act in their production.

When, despite being in your thirties, you are still living with your parents. When you're short of cash, your girlfriends aren't getting along, and your life increasingly tastes of cheap discount beer - then you recognize that it's high time to finally change something. Such conclusions are reached in unison by Albert, Marcin and Jacek - three buddies from the housing estate, who, after a series of business disasters, finally come up with an idea on how to make a nice profit. Thus is born a plan for a daring plot that will lead the heroes into the middle of a big wedding, where not only money, but also a chance for a hot romance awaits them. Along the way, all they have to do is not to spoil anything. And with that, as we all know, things can vary. Sometimes it's easier said than done to do something yourself.

Vengeful spirits of Japanese soldiers from World War II haunt a new high-rise office building in Hong Kong.

The Tiger - a forty-year-old film director - uses life by sprinkling it generously with alcohol and cocaine. The problem is that when hangover is left as the only companion in life.

Hanka is a young woman who suddenly abandons her stable life for no obvious reason, and undertakes a trip without any clear destination, meeting strangers on her way. At the same time, her boyfriend desperately tries to find her.

Omul lives with his family on a remote island in the Fire Archipelago. During a beach trip, a storm sweeps Omul and his younger sister Kimi into the sea, where Omul witnesses a mysterious creature threatening Kimi’s soul. Rescued by a whale, the siblings survive, but Kimi is left in a coma. Omul’s ability to talk to animals becomes crucial as he and his brother – who blames him for the accident – set out to find Sadumea, the mythical figure behind Kimi’s torment. With their dog Tela, they embark on a dangerous expedition deep into the island to save Kimi…

As a result of a combination of various circumstances, a 30-year-old gamer must reevaluate his current life and undergo an accelerated maturation course.

A winning lottery ticket has grave consequences for a married couple when they start hatching plans to kill each other for the prize money.

In nineteenth-century Łódź, Poland, three friends want to make a lot of money by building and investing in a textile factory. An exceptional portrait of rapid industrial expansion is shown through the eyes of one Polish town.

Jacek, a young violinist, falls in love with reciprocity with the cellist Ania. Ania's mother is against this relationship. So she sends Jacek to Cracow to get an antique violin. In the meantime, he and Ania go to New York. Jacek returns to Warsaw as soon as possible. However, the last train from Krakow has already left. On the platform, however, he meets people who are going to Katowice, from where the fastest train to Warsaw leaves. On the train, Jacek meets miners who are going to Warsaw to protest. He accidentally gets soiled with coal, which causes airport security to take him for one of the protesting miners who want to plant a bomb on the plane. Jacek runs onto the runway, but on the stairs to the plane is hit by anti-terrorists trying to prevent the alleged bombing.

"Emilia" is a parody of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Amelia". The title heroine was brought up in very specific conditions. Her parents could not transfer enough affection and knowledge to the growing child. Therefore, the girl created her own inner world in her mind, to live in complete isolation from the environment. One day, 19-year-old Emilia finds her life goal - she decides to do good around her. Unfortunately, bad luck means that people who meet on their way do not really need any help from her ...

A story about a German family during World War II with every family member having a different approach to Jews, raging from hatred to compassion.

Piotr Tymochowicz, media advisor to some of Poland's top politicians, claims that anybody can be molded into a charismatic leader. To prove it he's looking for a greenhorn that can be turned into a candidate. A call is put out for would-be participants, and hundreds apply. A small group is selected and under go training. Polish master Marcel Lozinksi followed Tymochowicz and this project for three years, and this beautifully shot and edited work paints a compelling portrait of cynical (and quite familiar) demagogy and populism in action.

The film takes us to Georgia, where the shadows of the post-Soviet past still loom large. At its center is investigative reporter Tamuna Museridze, who sets out to unravel a profoundly personal mystery. As she follows the trail of a widespread 1990s scheme in which newborns were taken from Georgian maternity wards and trafficked across the world, she exposes networks, mechanisms, and long-buried secrets along with family tragedies that remain just as painful today. The scale of the practice is staggering: as many as 100,000 children were stolen from hospitals and sold. Among them were Amy and Ano, twin sisters separated at birth who finally found each other in 2024 through social media.

The outbreak of World War II separates Ola and Aleksander Wat's marriage.

On a rusting cargo ship in the South China Sea, it's the young Polish captain's first command. His mutinous Chinese crew suspect him and his unscrupulous Boss of planning to scuttle the ship for an insurance scam. When the crew abandon ship, the young captain is left alone on board, helpless, anchored in a bay. That night while waiting anxiously on deck, he finds a naked body floating in the sea below, tangled up in the ship's rope ladder. Pulling the ladder, the captain discovers a Chinese woman in distress. She climbs on board, saying only "Hide me". Dawn comes a few hours later and so does a search party, looking for a murderer.....

When a troubled boy gets caught hiding in a drab man's house, he must finally confront the tumultuous experiences that led him to run away.

A young Kyrgyz immigrant tries to eke out a living in Moscow after abandoning her newborn and fleeing the hospital.

Bartłomiej, community elder and orator, must choose an appropriate successor, but finds difficulty in the aftermath of a local girl's tragic hit-and-run death. A community's pain reverberates through fractured relationships and the burden of funereal responsibility.

Two supermarket workers under the pressure of the boss have to mobilize themselves. They have only two days to find a goal in life. They decide to participate in the TV program "The unhappiest person of the month".

At the age of five, Chris, a young village boy meets his mother, Czesława, who is at the cusp of conquering entertainment industry by adopting a new persona - Violetta Villas. An unbelievably talented, ambitious mother and a sensitive child go on a decades long journey through Warsaw, Paris and Las Vegas.

Piotr is a psychiatrist. He is on night duty when a boy is brought to his ward. It is Kamil, the son he hasn't seen in years. The boy disappears from the hospital as quickly as he appeared. However, Piotr decides to get in touch with him. He invites him to his place and introduces him to his beautiful young fiancée. After Kamil's visit, the woman realizes that Piotr is a mystery to her and that she really knows nothing about him. And Piotr does indeed hide a dark secret...

A few naked women and children are bathing in a river. They are being secretly observed by a group of men who, at one point, decide to approach them in a violent manner, as if inspired by the behaviour of hippopotamuses.

A detachment of the Polish IFOR forces in Bosnia is led by Major Keller, who is being investigated for insubordination during a patrol in Srebrenica. The investigation is to be led by two arriving officers - Lieutenant Czacki and Major Kusz who will also replace Keller as CO. When the camp's RTO receives a communication from a downed Norwegian chopper, Keller ignores his standing orders and leads a platoon to rescue the crew.

A group of young people are going to an evening party. Unfortunately, unexpected events cause that seemingly innocent fun turns into a "real nightmare". After a year - when everything seems to be all right - tragic memories are back. Encircled by dark powers, the heroes must finally move their heads, and this is their biggest problem ...

A Taliban soldier struggles to survive after he escapes his captors and flees into the Polish countryside.

Six girls decide to spend the bachelorette party of one of them in a remote medieval castle in the Sudetenland. Thirsty for sensation, they eagerly listen to a bloody legend related to the history of the castle, which is told by a quirky caretaker. What they don't know is that the story is not a contrived fairy tale, but a description of events that took place here hundreds of years ago, the consequences of which continue to this day. They will have to face powers they had no idea existed.

Pawel and Magda escape to a secluded old house in Poland where Pawel spent his summers. What they don't realize is that Pawel's younger brother, Piotr, has run away from juvenile hall and is hiding at the house. The brothers' bittersweet reunion becomes a cruel yet emotional contest when criminal friends of Piotr's arrive at the house and threaten Pawel and Magda. Only Piotr can stop the cruel game -- but will he?

Shipped off to a Romanian orphanage to finish his sentence, a British criminal finds romance but also discovers corruption inside the facility.

After a quarrel with her boyfriend Goshia is kidnapped by a dangerous criminal. She will have to fight for his life.

This movie shows the simplest difference between Europe and former Soviet Union. It is the eponymous 89 mm - Russian train tracks are 89 mm wider than tracks in European countries. And because of this fact, it is not easy to go through the Soviet border by train in Brest as the passengers in the film do.

In a small Polish town in the summer of 1939, a married painter and a young Jewish woman begin an affair. Based on the novel by Marek Sołtysik.

Having spent years in prison, Franz Maurer is released and goes out into a new Poland, where nothing is as he remembered it to be. Who and what is waiting for the man who, for the last 25 years... hasn’t been doing anything? How will he find himself in a world where old principles and loyalty have ceased to exist? We will get to know that when fate reunites Franz and “Nowy”. Their meeting will change everything.

It is 1940. The first transport of prisoners arrives at the newly created concentration camp Auschwitz. One of them is Tadeusz “Teddy” Pietrzykowski, pre-war boxing champion of Warsaw. The camp officers force him to fight in the ring for his and other prisoners’ lives. However, his every win strengthens the hope that Nazis are not invincible. Auschwitz officers notice the growing resistance. The confrontation with the authorities of the camp becomes inevitable.

A maligned police officer receives one last chance to save her career when she must break up a crime syndicate by masquerading as one of their own.

This is a story about the inhabitants of a block of flats standing alone on the outskirts of an industrial city. Unemployment, lack of prospects, and powerlessness create a special aura in which events unfold. The main character, 25-year-old Goździk, has lived here since he was born. He does not work or study.

Story of a tragic love triangle that develops between a mother daugther and a farmhand. A good-looking widow lives alone on a farm with her teenage daughter. Their neighbor occasionally helps them in the farmwork. He would have eventually married the mother, but the daughter tries to seduce him at all costs. He becomes the lover of both women, but eventually runs away leaving the mother shattered and the daughter pregnant.

A story of a relationship between an overprotective mother and her son. It is a playful game of constant changes of social and family roles, age and sizes. The film tries to answer the question who is truly an adult and what does it mean.

Summer of 1939. Zosia is a young Polish girl who is deeply in love with Ukrainian Petro. Their great love will be put to the test when her father decides to marry her to a wealthy widower Skiba. Right after wedding she is left alone because her husband is drafted to the Polish army for the war with Germany. Meanwhile, tensions grow due to Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians living side by side.

A group of students of the last year of the local motor technical school is slowly entering adult life. An atmosphere of emptiness and hopelessness reigns around them. Young people have no idea for their future, but they do not want to duplicate the pattern of a poor existence according to which their parents live. One of them, Arek, had a chance to break out of this vicious circle for a moment. The possibility of a brilliant career, fame and a lot of money was opening up to him, the Polish Junior Champion in Kickboxing. Serious heart disease shattered these plans. Arek dreams of renting a flat and freeing himself from his alcoholic father. Together with Lalka, Panicz, Mucha and Renata - his closest friends, he often visits the Kosmos pub, owned by the local mafioso Marsel. One day Marsel offers Arek and Mucha a jump: they are to break into the apartment on the top floor of a skyscraper.

At the Kremlin's behest, Bulgarian secret services, along with Polish comrades, prepare for an attempt on the Pope's life. The best candidate to cover up the tracks and eliminate the assassin is retired SB agent Konstanty Brusicki, nicknamed 'Bruno', who has only one month left to live.

Two intellectuals, a writer and a director, begin to play a mysterious psychological game in a peaceful countryside manor house during the Nazi occupation.

Two young men escape from a psychiatric hospital. They have to return the money misappropriated by one of them. They have two days to do so. They overcome many obstacles and meet various people who involve them in their personal affairs. The confrontation with "real life" is not easy for the characters. We learn the real reasons for their stay in the hospital.

In Zakopane - though really anywhere in the universe - an alien civilization lands seeking help with an intimate problem and awaits their contact, Yrek. When a nosy innkeeper alerts the press upon learning their mission, journalists descend and inadvertently entangle local Polish and Czech gangsters and their tailing agents in a cosmic game of cat-and-mouse, threatening to turn the quiet mountain retreat into the scene of an interplanetary showdown.

During a ride a woman picks up a hitchhiker. From the very beginning the man doesn't come across as trustworthy and the woman, anxious and feeling the growing threat, decides to pick up one more person. In the confined space of the car the three strangers begin a tense game. The characters hide some secrets that, revealed in small steps, will lead to tragic events.

20 years after Hansel and Gretel ate the witch, the siblings are publishing a book about their adventures, slightly changing the plot. Gretel has found herself perfectly in the new reality. Hoping to get rich quick, she discusses with her fans. Unfortunately, her enthusiasm is not shared by Jas, who has become traumatized and, according to him, did not like the changes in his life. While signing copies of the books, the siblings are visited by Andrzej Piórko, who has spotted serious crimes, the description of which Hansel and Gretel included in the work.

Furious Snake, in order to save humanity from annihilation, confronts the Cyborg-Zombie.

The flood is fast approaching. Noah, who was building the ark, used all his strength, squandered friendships and family relationships to fulfill God's will. When God reappears on Earth, Noah slowly descends into madness.

Dramatic fate of Sid's friends forces him to fight not only for friendship, but also for the love of your life.

Another meeting on losses and ways to act on the presence of the dragon under the king's castle begins. Queen Henry unexpectedly appears at the meeting and wants to throw a fresh perspective on the problem. Unfortunately, the ideas proposed by the participants do not satisfy the queen. The woman constantly scoffs at the suggested solutions and ridicules the members of the meeting. As it turns out, she herself has a much better way to tame the beast.

Agata is a self-fulfilled woman who loves life. She is visually impaired. Robert is an acclaimed photographer. He has everything, yet feels as though he has nothing. Their meeting will change everything. Together, they will face their past and their own limitations, discovering that true love is born from acceptance and the courage to be yourself.