| The inaugural Polish Film Festival has a special significance for one guest: he didn’t think he’d live to see it. Film festivals can have many virtues but rarely, if ever, has one festival been hailed for helping to save a man’s life even before its launch. That’s not an extravagant boast by Ted Matkowski, director of the inaugural Polish Film Festival, which kicks off in Melbourne on October 11 and in Sydney on October 19.
In Melbourne, the Classic Cinema in Elsternwick will host the festival from 11 to 21 October.
In Sydney the Ritz Cinema in Randwick will host the festival from 19 to 28 October.
In Canberra the Arc Cinema in Acton will present 5 films on 18, 19 and 20 of October.
Tickets
About venues
Rather, the life-saving declaration comes from veteran Polish actor/director Jerzy Stuhr, who’ll be a guest at the festival. A year ago Matkowski discovered Stuhr was battling throat cancer, which brought back vivid memories of the nasal cancer that Matkowski had experienced in 2005.
Learning that Stuhr felt alone and forgotten, a plight that resonated with him, Matkowski rang the actor/director and invited him to his Polish festival. When he was told the proposed dates, Stuhr responded: “You’re crazy. How do you know I will be alive? I was told I had three or four months at the maximum.”
Matkowski felt so confident that Stuhr would survive that he immediately booked business class tickets to Australia for the director and his wife, departing on October 4. Stuhr subsequently wrote a book about his experiences in fighting cancer, stating the invitation to the festival had helped save his life by giving him a goal and an even stronger will to live. At the fest Stuhr, who’s recovering well a month after his treatment finished, will attend screenings of Juliusz Machulski’s 1984 cult sci-fi comedy/action film Sexmission, in which he plays one of two scientists who are placed in hibernation and brought back to life three years later in an experiment.
Matkowski is surprised that no one had organised a Polish festival in Australia until now, as far as he knows. His Melbourne-based company Puma Press has staged regular screening of Polish films since 2000, aiming to promote Polish cinema to the Australian community.
“I was a bit sceptical about festivals because I used to believe it was better to show excellent films every few months; not everyone has the time to go to a festival over 10 or 12 days,” he says.
In 2008 he started sponsoring an annual award, the Golden Kangaroo, at the national Polish Film Festival staged in the seaside city of Gdynia, and he invited the director or actor from the winning film to Australia.
In compiling the programme for his festival, Matkowski sought advice from a panel including director Sophia Turkiewicz, Brisbane International Film Festival director Richard Moore and filmmaker Rod Freedman. Their main criterion was to choose films that Australians can understand and relate to, ruling out several Polish titles that may have been too obscure or esoteric.
There will be three world premieres including the opening night attraction My Father’s Bike, Piotr Trzaskalski comedy-drama which stars Polish jazz luminary Michał Urbaniak as a retired jazzman whose wife leaves him for another man, sparking a family crisis.
The others are The Fifth Season of the Year[i], a dark comedy about the friendship between a retired piano teacher and a coal miner as they take a trip to the sea, from Sydney-based director Jerzy Domaradzki; and [i]In a Bedroom, the debut feature from writer-director Tomasz Wasilewski, the story of a 40-year-old beauty who poses as a call girl on the internet, hooks up with wealthy men in their homes, knocks them out with sleeping pills and steals their cash. None of this trio has yet been released in Poland.
Among the Australian premieres are Katarzyna Roslaniec’s Mall Girls, which caused a stir in Poland for portraying teenagers who go to shopping centres to sell their bodies for a few dollars to sex-starved men during their lunch breaks; Rafael Lewandowski’s The Mole , a political thriller about a clothing importer whose father is accused of being a secret collaborator for the Communist security service; and the closing night film Rosa, the saga of a German Polish widow who builds a relationship with a former Polish Home Army man in the aftermath of WWII, directed by Wojciech Smarzowski.
Another highlight is the recently restored 1918 silent film Mania which features contemporary music by famous composer Jerzy Maksymiuk. It stars Polish actress Pola Negri who was hailed as the first female European Hollywood film star and had trysts with Charlie Chaplin and Rudolf Valentino.
Among other classics screening are Wojciech Has’ 1973 drama The Hour Glass Sanatorium, the tale of a young man’s journey to see his dying father in a sanatorium; The Promised Land, Andrzej Wajda’s 1970 drama about three young friends, a Pole, a Jew and a German, who pool their money to build a factory in a ruthless pursuit of fortune; and Pharaoh, Jerzy Kawalerowicz's 1970 epic about an ancient struggle for power involving a young, handsome, socially conscious sovereign of Egypt who is threatened by neighbours.
Another guest, esteemed director Krzysztof Zanussi, will attend screenings of The Constant Factor, his 1980 Cannes Film Festival Jury prize-winner about a young man who is confronted by corrupt and vindictive colleagues at work and negligent officials at the hospital where his mother lies dying. Also screening will be a segment of Zanussi’s 2009 film Revisited, which imagines what would have happened to the earlier film’s characters 25 years later.
Slovenian director Mitja Okorn’s Letters to St. Nicholas is a romantic comedy that centres on five women and five men who are all lost in life. Barbara Sass-Zdort’s In the Name of the Devil looks at a twenty-something woman who takes refuge in a nunnery after traumatic events and is accused by the Mother Superior of being possessed by Satan. Greg Zglinski’s Courage focuses on two brothers who witness a girl being attacked and insulted by hooligans on a train, a meditation on cowardice.
Two features from debut directors are Bartek Konopka’s Fear of Falling, which examines the difficult relationship between a son and his mentally ill father; and Piotr Mularuk’s Yuma, a thriller about a young man who becomes a gangster 20 years after the collapse of Communism. Leszek Dawid’s My Name is Ki focuses on a woman who does not want to follow in her mother’s footsteps and rejects the stereotype of a single, unfulfilled mother but struggled with relationships with men.
Matkowski, who’s a foreign correspondent for Polish TV in Australia and New Zealand, says the line-up attests to the health of cinema in Poland, a country which produces 40 or 50 films annually. “Even a few years ago I was worried that Polish cinema couldn’t find its own way to exist, to survive,” he says. “Cinema was a bit lost but now they have recovered and more and more films are produced and more and more Poles are going to Polish films which compete very well with Hollywood productions.”
Five films will be presented in Canberra. The fest is supported by the Polish Film Institute, Poland’s Documentary and Feature Film Production Company and the Polish Embassy in Australia. Ideally he’d like to attract sufficient sponsorship to make this an annual event, or at worst, every second year, and eventually extend to Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane.
source: SBS
www.polishfilmfestival.net/
| 
