A STRONG POLISH REPRESENTATION AT THE IDFA FESTIVAL
Eleven Polish documentaries qualified for this year’s edition of the IDFA festival. Four of them will compete for awards in the competition sections, whereas the remaining seven films will be shown in the non-competitive thematic programmes.
International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam IDFA is the largest and one of the most important documentary film festivals in the world. Every year, it attracts over 100 000 viewers and is visited by several hundred accredited guests from the most important documentary industry organisations and the films screened at IDFA are often selected to take part in other film festivals. This year’s, 27th edition of the festival will be held from 19-30 November.
In the IDFA Competition for Feature-Length Documentary, the films “The Queen of Silence” by Agnieszka Zwiefka and “Something better to come” by Hanna Polak will participate. Both films are co-productions and tell the stories of girls growing up in difficult conditions. “The Queen of Silence” is a Polish-German co-production, and its protagonist is 10-year-old deaf Denisa - a girl from an illegal gypsy settlement, who expresses her emotions by dancing inspired by the choreography of Bollywood films.
Polish-Danish “Something better to come” is a story of Jula - a girl who lives near Moscow, on the svalka - the largest garbage dump in Europe. This film was also invited to participate in the Doc U Competition, the aim of which is to familarise young people with documentary cinema. The jury of this competition consists of young people aged 15-18.
“My Friend the Enemy” by Wanda Kościa was chosen by the IDFA programmers to participate in the IDFA Competition for Mid-Length Documentary. The filmmakers accompany Poles, who survived the massacre by the Ukrainian nationalists in 1943, during their journey to Ukraine, to the places where they used to live.
A film by a student of the Warsaw Film School, Zofia Pręgowska, “Invisible” will have a chance to win awards in the IDFA Competition for Student Documentary. The film’s protagonist, Ms. Krystyna, is a 90-year-old woman who lives alone and writes poems, in spite of being nearly blind.
A short documentary “Starting Point” by Michał Szcześniak will be screened in the non-competitive Panorama section. The film tells the story of Aneta, who is doing her time in prison for murder, and starts working as a caregiver in the rest home.
In the Bests of Fests section, showing films which were successful at film festivals last year, Polish-German “Domino Effect” by Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosołowski will participate. It deals with a subject of the difficult love between Rafael, the Minister of Sport of Abkhazia, and a Russian opera singer, Natasha, which is inextricably bound with the contemporary history of Abkhazia.
Three Polish films are in the programme of the Paradocs section, presenting films from the confines of the documentary genre. Two of them are by Marcel Łoziński. The audience in Amsterdam will have a chance to see “How to Live?” (1977) and “Marticulation” (1979). The third film qualified for Paradocs is Polish-German co-production “RekonGrodek” by Margherita Malerby and Devin Horan.
Polish documentary is also represented in the section Music Documentary, to which two films are invited: Polish-German “Penderecki. Paths through the Labirynth” by Anna Schmidt and “The breath of the Orchestra” by Katarzyna Kasica.
The festival is accompanied by the Docs for Sale film market, which was established in 1996 and is visited by about 250 representatives of the documentary film industry every year. This year, there are twelve Polish documentary films in the market’s video library, which were selected by Krakow Film Foundation within the frames of the Polish Docs programme.
Polish documentary films have been present at IDFA since its first edition, and in recent years they were given some important awards and special mentions. In 1998, the best feature-length documentary film award went to “Photographer” by Dariusz Jabłoński. In 2009, the film “Six Weeks” by Marcin Janos Krawczyk won the main award in Short Documentary Competition. A year later, the film “A Screening at the Tatry cinema” by Igor Chojna was nominated for the student film award. In 2012, two Polish films were nominated for the IDFA awards: “Bad Boy – High Security Cell” by Janusz Mrozowski in the feature-length category and ”Rogalik” by Paweł Ziemilski in the short category. Last year, “Our Curse” by Tomasz Śliwiński was nominated in the student documentary section.
The full list of the films qualified for the participation at the festival can be found on the festival’s website.