Paula Hammond - Features EditorThis year, the iconic Regent Street Cinema will be hosting the New Polish Cinema category as part of the 14th annual Polish Film Festival.
From Friday 8 April to Sunday 10 April, the Polish Film Festival will be showcasing a series of films from the New Polish Cinema, including Karbala, These Daughters Of Mine, Life Must Go On, Demon, Body and Deluge Redivivus.
With a smorgasbord of Polish cult films, new dramas and acclaimed pieces, the Polish Film Festival New Polish Film category will delight all viewers and followers of this inspiring sector.
One of Poland’s most popular directors, Jacek Bromski returns to the festival with his Gdynia-winning Anatomy Of Evil (8th April), an engaging thriller about an aging mafia hit-man released from prison on parole who is assigned a mysterious assassination, but whom is physically unable to complete the task without help. With the mission in jeopardy a sniper is engaged to take over the task.
In Dariusz Gajewski’s heart-stirring family drama Strange Heaven (9th April), Basia and Marek are a young immigrant couple living in Sweden. One innocent lie triggers an avalanche and their daughter is placed within a foster family by social services. So begins a dramatic fight with the cruel machine of bureaucracy to get their child back. In award-winning director and screenwriter Krzysztof Łukasiewicz’s contemporary Polish war film Karbala (9th April), the viewer is transported to Kurdistan and the Iraqi War in 2004. The film explores the dramatic and unexpected real life battle that took place between unprepared Polish and Bulgarian soldiers and Iraqi rebels, and exposes the helplessness and realities of war.
Be prepared to laugh and cry with family drama, These Daughters Of Mine (9th April). Kinga Dębska’s follow up to her feature debut, Hel (2009) tells the story of two, distant middle-aged sisters forced to come together in the face of their mother’s illness and struggle with the realities of their natures.
Inspired by the true story of Tadeusz Szymków, Maciej Migas’s debut feature Life Must Go On (9th April) features a phenomenal central performance from Tomasz Kot (Bogowie) as a feckless actor, suffering from alcoholism who discovers he has incurable cancer and only three months to live. He decides to turn his life around and most importantly reconnect with his daughter but is three months enough to fix all of life’s mistakes?
In partnership with UK Jewish Film, Marcin Wrona’s atmospheric ghost story Demon (10th April), screens as a tribute to the late filmmaker who died suddenly during the Gdynia Film Festival last year. Itay Tiran give an impressively vivid yet understated performance as Piotr, a young man who journeys from England to marry his beloved Żaneta at her family’s country home in rural Poland. Complications arise when Piotr uncovers a human skeleton buried in the backyard of his newly inherited property and guests start to notice the groom’s increasingly bizarre behaviour.
Awarded both the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival and Golden Lion at the Gdynia Film Festival for Best Film, Małgorzata Szumowska’s thought-provoking Body (10th April) is a darkly comic meditation on grief and reconciliation, using the theme of the corporal and ethereal body to weave together the stories of three interconnected but radically different people attempting to deal with the loss of a loved one.
For more information about the 14th Polish Film Festival visit: http://kinoteka.org.uk
To view times and booking information for the Regent Street Cinema, visit: https://www.regentstreetcinema.com
