Discoveries from Poland World Cinema

Transgender Sambor tries to curry favor with a group of skaters.

The film deals with the issues of adolescents. The protagonist - Łukasz, a serious young man, falls into conflicts with his surroundings due to his uncompromising attitude.

An engineer on a business trip meets his long-lost father in a hotel bar.

The action is placed in a cramped flat in Warsaw’s district of Ochota. A father and a son, both bedridden, live in a fascinating symbiosis. The son, a well‑known photographer Bernard ben Dobrowolski, is lying in bed because a chronic condition has deformed his body and immobilized him. The father, Dominik, has recently suffered from a stroke. Now they are taking care of each other and crowds of visitors move through their room.

In this intense and inspiring family portrait, 12-year-old Laura is our guide, and she shows us her life alongside her deaf parents. We will get to see her unusual, challenging, and surprisingly ordinary everyday life.

Travelling is a violation of the rules when a player holding the ball moves one or both feet illegally. Fifteen-year-old Justyna, trying to escape her mom's life, falls into a fascination with the new neighbor. A short and intense relationship will push her to grow up quickly.

From 'The Workshop of the Film Form'.

Julian Stryjkowski, writer and philosopher, author of the novels "Bieg do Fragala" (The Run to Fragal), "Pożegnanie z Italią" (Farewell to Italy), "Głosy w ciemności" (Voices in the Dark), "Czarna róża" (The Black Rose), "Austeria" (The Inn), "Wielki strach" (The Great Fear), "Odpowiedź" (The Answer), and "King David Lives," recalls his childhood and his first literary experiences. He evokes the forgotten world of small Galician towns, recounts the traditions of the home where he grew up, and tells of his mother, siblings, and neighbors—the people who shaped the world of his childhood.

A former retired seaman moves in with his daughter and her family. Unable to find the desired peace, he spends more and more time away from home.

The artist Małgorzata Goliszewska's journey to Rotterdam, accompanied by incessant phone calls from her mother, brilliantly illustrates the mechanisms of producing fear and a sense of constant threat.

It’s 2020. A virus has taken over the world. People are dying in masses. The economy has fallen (or so it seems). Unemployment remains a relevant and widely ignored problem. In this setting, an accident happens in the city of Lodz. They say a blue crystal fell from the sky and killed a homeless man. Miłosz and Tomek, two random guys, find the body and the rock.

A Warsaw Pollena-Uroda cosmetics factory radio broadcaster is working on a programme investigating the workers' sense of factory ownership. The workers' answers come as a surprise, especially to the management. About the ruling and the ruled in communist Poland.

Psychological drama; a retired sailor, after 40 years of absence, returns to his native village to spend the rest of his life there. After forty years of work at sea, Petty Officer Ignacy Krzeminski returns to his home village in the Suwałki region. The meeting with his former beloved, now a widow with four children, ends in a fiasco, nothing connects them anymore. Also coming into contact with relatives and former acquaintances make Ignacy realize that he is a stranger here.

A certain civil servant dreams of climbing the career ladder. One day, an opportunity for promotion arises, and with it comes a Guardian Angel who will follow his every move, accompany him at every step, and report back...

A young girl is getting ready to meet her boyfriend. Her mother is waiting for her to return.

Piotr, the sound engineer, suffers from a rare disease - Tourette's syndrome, which manifests itself in involuntary shouting of insults. This disease interferes with his normal functioning a lot, things get even more complicated when Piotr meets Kasia.

Two death row prisoners willingly confess to more murders to delay their execution. A TV adaptation of Janusz Krasiński's play.

The People's Guard unit takes a pistol from a German soldier. It is then used as a training weapon and in actions against the occupant.

A 16-year-old girl living in Ustka meets a boy with whom she falls in love at first sight. When Paweł goes to his hometown of Poznań, the girl decides to be with her beloved at all costs.

Young journalist Helena is investigating mysterious suicides. In the course of it, she stumbles onto the trail of a company that buys monthly blood. The traces lead to Victor, a descendant of a Nazi officer, a member of the Vril group, which conducted medical research in the concentration camps. Young Kabbalist Jacob assists Helena in her investigation and introduces her to the subject of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism. Helena suspects that Victor is illegally continuing his grandfather's research...

Musicians and jazz lovers come to Zakopane to relax and make music together. Kalatówki is the location where the jazz campsite takes place. Andrzej Trzaskowski's band “Jazz Believers” is the star of the film.

The son of the town hall trumpeter finds a bird with a shot-through wing. The boy and his sister look after the animal.

What will be left behind when humanity vanishes from the surface of the earth? Abandoned stations, schools and plants create a post-apocalyptic landscape of the world without people.

Article 66 of the 1952 Polish Constitution guaranteed women equal rights, including work, equal pay, and childcare. Notable women held various roles, and the state supported women before and after childbirth with nurseries and kindergartens. The film, made in the socialist realist style, praised the socialist system and showed historical optimism but also highlighted the burden of balancing work and unpaid housework. Notably, the film was created by women.

A single father raising a son with Down’s syndrome decides to fulfil his biggest dream of becoming a professional actor.

A film portrait of Władysław Szypuła, a farmer from the village of Sołonka in the Rzeszów region, who is a man with a specific philosophy of life. Here he is, at the end of the 20th century, cultivating the land solely with his own muscles, with self-made tools, “independent” of the general economic and market climate. Although his life passes in toil and hardship, he is full of inner peace and kindness to others.

Living a solitary life in a world without light or hope, the central character is engrossed in the pursuit of his lost past. The cycle he fell into after losing everything is the only one he knows. It is also a personal prison he can no longer free himself from.

The film was made under the terms of the partition agreement and with the participation of Władysław Reymont. However, numerous cuts and alterations detracted from the film's educational intent. Only Mieczysław Frenkel, who made his screen debut with this film, received praise. The film has not survived to this day, all copies burned during World War II.

A family prepares to meet friends.

A documentary about boredom in the Polish countryside. There, where fate has left people with hopelessness and an incredible unwillingness to do anything but wait for that one day— Saturday. As the film's protagonists say, Saturday is a day of fulfillment, charging up for the upcoming monotonous week. It's a day of relaxation, drinking, and watching the erotic show in the local dance club. The meaning of life boils down to waiting. Waiting and looking for a buddy who can be convinced not to drink and drive his beat-up old car to the party on Saturday. Saturday is magic, the prose of life, and the only goal.

The wire girl no longer wants to be of wire, so she embarks on a journey to find a solution to her problem.

The film is a praise of human willingness to take on the endless challenges of fate. The loaf of bread a prisoner receives each day is used to patch thousands of holes in the cell walls. They are inhabited by nerve-wracking busy insects that flit constantly from hole to hole. When the work is finished, the prisoner is unexpectedly transferred to another cell. The new loaf of bread held in his hands freezes dramatically halfway to his mouth: the walls of this cell are also strewn with thousands of holes.

A 2001 documentary about one of the branches of the Polish feminist movement. Narrated by Zofia Miłuńska, president of the Dakini Association for the Comprehensive Development of Women. The film has not yet been released because the screening committee for Polish Television's Program 2 deemed it unsuitable for broadcast on ethical and aesthetic grounds.

A creative documentary showing the absurdity of Polish reality in the 1970s. The dramatic axis is the story of a man who, in the middle of the Polish People's Republic, decided to start a mushroom cultivation and processing plant—a profitable business, and therefore, from the point of view of the decision-makers of the time, suspicious and dangerous.

The mischievous golden-feathered hen escapes from the farmyard. In a frantic chase after her favorite, the grandmother ends up... in an airplane standing at the airport.

A young Polish aviator, feeling cheated by the British prime minister, gives back his war decorations. Transferred to Washington as a civilian, he meets Denis.

A young locksmith, Jerzy, builds an airplane. By chance, he meets the Brazilian millionaire Tomasz Kotlica and his daughter Janina. Witold Siemacki, an aviator, stands in the way of Jerzy's career and happiness.

A carnivorous sack wages war on the household items that surround it. The household items band together to defeat their aggressor, but are their troubles truly over?

An intimate film focused on a man and the small world around him. The protagonist is a lonely man working as a railroad crossing guard in a place where practically no one passes by and no trains stop. His only entertainment is playing the trumpet. However, one day the signalman is given a chance to change his rather monotonous life.

The beloved cat and her friends face new adventures. This time Kitty Kotty spends a day with friends at kindergarten, and meets new friends on the playground.

An animated episode film made up of a series of 15-minute stories, each set in a different European country, and in each of which the mother, both parents or the child meet a tragic end.

A mysterious forest somewhere in the Łódź region has for generations inspired fear and curiosity among the inhabitants of nearby villages. They recount the stories they told or heard about ghosts and phenomena that defy rational explanation.

The adventures of a classic "podrywacz" character known from Molière's drama and Byron's poem, who has not lost popularity until today. All this is shown with a pinch of salt, in a grotesque form of a cut-out film, reminiscent of the comic book editions of "Trzy Muszkieterów".

A film about Michal Wisniewski, a man who achieved success coming out of the social lowlands. Ich Troje, the band formed by him, almost immediately became one of the most popular music groups in Poland. Popularity, the number of albums sold and concerts played, however, does not go hand in hand with the acceptance of opinion makers. People in the music industry refuse to notice the phenomenon of the Ich Troje band. Journalists are stripping Michal Wisniewski of his privacy. Who exactly is Michal Wisniewski? What is his real life story? What is at the heart of the Ich Troje band's spectacular success?

A TV musical featuring the appearances of famed actor Bogumił Kobiela and the most popular Polish musicians of the time.

EDEN is a hand-painted feature-length animated film directed by Andrzej Czeczot and produced between 1996 and 2002. The story follows Józek, an ordinary man suddenly drawn into a surreal infernal world populated by grotesque figures, shifting identities and unstable realities. As he moves through a landscape of continuous metamorphosis, angels transform into demons, music reshapes space, and familiar cultural symbols dissolve into dreamlike visions. Structured entirely without dialogue and driven by an original score by Michał Urbaniak, the film unfolds through movement, visual transformation and rhythm rather than conventional narrative storytelling. Created entirely using traditional hand-painted animation techniques, EDEN represents a rare example of large-scale European auteur animation from the pre-digital era and is currently undergoing restoration as part of the broader EDEN Universe project.

What are the reasons underlying the human drive toward self-destruction? What is the wellhead of motivation for a person who chooses a life involving perpetual struggle, self-harm and risking their health? Is the road of physical pain an escape route from other kinds of pain? And finally, what lies at the roots of the contemporary fascination with risk and aggression? "Arena" is a film project about contemporary games, arenas and gladiators.

The three protagonists are faced with a problem that could lead to the breakdown of their friendship.

A brother and a sister, both gay, go to visit their strict parents for a long weekend in May. They want to finally come out to the family and introduce their loved ones. But just before the two couples get to the parents’ house, panic suddenly takes over! They all decide to pretend to be straight until they feel it’s safe to tell the truth. They temporarily swap partners… leading to a classic comedy of errors!

Animation short by Alina Maliszewska.