What will the 51st edition bring?
The 51st Krakow Film Festival will be held between May 23rd-29th 2011.
Our films will be screened at the following cinemas: Kijów.Centrum (Al. Krasińskiego 34), Mikro (Lea 5), Kino Pod Baranami (Rynek Główny 27), and Krakowskie Centrum Kinowe ARS (Św. Jana 6); professionals from the whole world will gather at the Manggha Centre of Japanese Art and Technology (Konopnickiej 26) for the Dragon Forum panel of workshops and pitching, as well as at the Academy for the Dramatic Arts (Straszewskiego 21-22) for the conferences, and at the Cracovia Hotel (Focha 1) for the Krakow Film Market.
Three juries consisting of artists, filmmakers, and critics judge the KFF’s three competitions (approximately 100 movies). This year our jurors include: Tue Steen Müller, one of the top experts of European documentary cinematography, member of the Danish Film Institute; Marcin Koszałka, documentary filmmaker from Krakow, cameraman and director; Kaleo La Belle, documentary filmmaker, awarded the Golden Horn at the the 50th Krakow Film Festival for ‘Beyond This Place’; Anna Kazejak-Dawid, director, screenwriter, co-author of ‘Oda do radości’ and the award-winning ‘Bocznica’; and Tadeusz Słobodzianek, renowned playwright, author of ‘Nasza klasa’, which received the NIKE Literary Award in 2010.
13 years ago the KFF instituted a lifetime achievement award for filmmakers. This year the Dragon of Dragons Award will go to Piotr Kamler, one of the grand masters of cinematic animation. His works have received numerous awards, including the Grand Prix of the Annecy festival, which is equivalent to Cannes in the field of animation. Kamler is highly praised in France, where his movies have been released on DVD. It’s high time for appreciation in his homeland!
The three competitions will feature documentaries, animations and fiction movies. The entries will be selected from a record-breaking list of 2700 submissions to the organizers and movies discovered at international festivals. The Director of the Festival, Krzysztof Gierat, will preside over a 12-member Selection Committee, composed of critics, film theorists, directors, and screenwriters. Longstanding associates of the Festival – Jadwiga Głowa-Hučková, Anita Piotrowska and Jerzy Armata – sit on the Committee, Darek Kowalski, Robert Sowa, Joanna Pawluśkiewicz, Sebastian Liszka and Tomasz Natora have returned for their second term as arbiters, while Joanna Ostrowska (film theorist), Tomasz Bielenia (critic), Mariusz Frukacz (film theorist), Przemysław Nowakowski and Łukasz M. Maciejewski (screenwriters) are its newest members.
Over half of the entries are short feature films. This year’s lineup of the International Competition includes ‘The Third Rule’, a thrilling comedy directed by Aundre Johnson and featuring Anthony Hopkins as a sham TV guru. Daniel Mulloy, laureate of the Krakow Film Festival’s Golden Dragon award for his movie ‘Dad’, returns to the theme of seeking intimacy: ‘Baby’ is a warm tale of the brief affair between a white woman and a black man, precipitated by a chance meeting on the bus.
Animated movies of various genres will also participate in the International Short Film Competition. The protagonist of ‘Sticky Ends’, a horror movie created by French animator Osman Cerfon, is a fish-faced man who can bring down disaster on his victims. Katarina Kerekesova’s ‘Stones’ is a musical taking place in a mine; a female guest paying a visit to one of the miners becomes the catalyst for a chain of tragic events.
Almost 1000 movies were submitted to the documentary section. One of the films already entered in the competition is the intriguing ‘Hangman’ directed by Natalie Braun – the story of the man who carried out the execution of Adolf Eichmann; the hangman turned to religion and became a shochet, or ritual slaughterer. In ‘Nobody Knows My Name’, James Nicholson tells the story of the radical Black Panther movement.
Movies about the consequences of human weakness will also be present at the Festival – Marcus Lindeen’s ‘Regretters’ is both fascinating and intimate, a conversation between two men who decided to undergo sex reassignment surgery and now rue the results. Alejandra Sanchez shows us a shocking confrontation between a man abused as a prepubescent boy and his abuser, a priest, in her documentary ‘Agnus Dei’. Julie Moggan’s ‘Guilty Pleasures’ reveal the dangers of a seemingly innocent fascination with Harlequin romances, and ‘My Avatar and Me’, directed by the Danes Bente Milton and Mikkel Stolt, broaches the popular subject of living in a virtual world.
Tomasz Wolski, who has been a recurring guest of the Krakow Film Festival for the last several years, will present his newest documentary ‘The Doctors’ . Having introduced hospital themes in ‘The Clinic’, the author shifts his attention from the patients to the doctors, following them with an invisible camera. ‘My Reincarnation’ returns to the parent-child dynamic, particularly favored by the Krakow Film Festival – the relationship in Jennifer Fox’s documentary is unique, since the father is a Tibetan master and his son a rebellious European. Virgil Vernier aimed his camera at the entrance to a Parisian club; his ‘Pandore’ is characterized by sparseness of form and richness of expression.
With every passing year, more Polish films created outside the country are being entered in the competitions at the Krakow Film Festival. This year brings us Polish documentaries about Russia, Argentina, Cuba, and Cambodia. ‘Phnom Penh Lullaby’ will run in both the national and international competitions. Its director, Paweł Kloc, met his protagonists by chance on a trip to the capital of Cambodia. The document tells the story of an Israeli fortune teller and his Cambodian partner, a woman with a troubled past. Magdalena Pięta’s ‘Planet Kirsan’ was made in the Republic of Kalmykia, whose president is a renowned promoter of chess. The film follows the progress of two boys trained by the head of state to master this difficult discipline.
The laureates of each of the three competitions will receive statuettes and monetary prizes. This year’s prize pool is over 200.000 PLN.
Sound of Music. Once again the Sound of Music will ring out by the Wawel castle – this time also in an outdoor version: energetic screenings of films where music itself is the protagonist, infusing the audience with the enthusiasm of its creators.
Our screens will also show Festival Laureates, which have already charmed the audiences in other countries – straight from Lipsk: the new documentary of Jerzy Śladkowski, a longtime friend of the Krakow Film Festival, whose ‘Two Rembrandts in the Garden’ (which inaugurated last year’s KFF) have been brought to cinemas by the Krakow Film Foundation. ‘Vodka Factory’ follows a young vodka factory worker trying to escape bleak small-town existence and make it to Moscow. Eran Paz’s award-winning ‘Jeremiah’ tells the stories of Russian Jews, emigres to Israel, battling exclusion, depression, and drinking problems.
A special retrospective of films of Wojciech Wiszniewski, posthumously awarded the Golden Hobby Horse at the Krakow Film Festival in 1981, will be a tribute to this exceptional artist and documentary director on the 30th anniversary of his death.
Those who think that documentaries should be particularly devoted to recounting individual stories will enjoy our Somewhere in Europe section, while Night of the Music Videos has a completely different slant – hand-picked shows of original music videos have long attracted both fans and night owls to the Kijów.Centrum cinema.