Scene One: A crowd gets eaten by the roasted chickens and crabs on the banquet table. Scene Two: As a train moves, all that an onscreen silhouette of a man sees is a repetitive countryside landscape saturated with an intense green colour. Yet as soon as the man gets into the city, the landscape becomes…

‘The importance of ordinary people, the everyday, belief in artistic freedom and the rejection of established cinematic norms are some of the principles common to the early work of Czech director Milos Forman and the British Free Cinema movement. This programme, jointly curated with Close-Up and screening from original 16mm and 35mm prints, marks Miloš…

Tomek  is the man who has it all in Slovenian born director Mitja Okorn’s 2016 rom-com Planeta Singli.  Set in Poland, it features a celebrated chat show host with a cult following, Tomek (Maciej Stuhr), who not only has a successful career but also women falling at his feet. Yet clearly there’s also something lacking…

Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage (Ostatni Etap) is one of the world’s earliest feature films about the Holocaust, premiering in Poland as early as March 1948. It’s also a personal narrative: partly based on Jakubowska’s own experiences at Birkenau women’s camp at Auschwitz, The Last Stage chronicles life in the camp from a personal angle, filmed on…

Death doesn’t always put things in perspective, at least not when art is involved. Were it not the last project by one of the 20th century’s great filmmakers, Powidoki, (Afterimage) might have made a respectful turn on the international film circuit before fading into genteel obscurity. With the passing of Andrzej Wajda last year this…

In some ways it may come as a surprise to discover that a film as bizarre as The Last Family (Ostatnia Rodzina) is based firmly on reality, detailing the life of the internationally acclaimed Polish artist Zdzislaw Beksinski. On the other hand, perhaps the absurdity of it all strikes a bit too close to home to…

Janusz Majewski’s film The Eccentrics (Excentrycy) bagged several awards at the Polish Academy Awards in 2016, including best supporting actor and actress (Wojciech Pszoniak and Anna Dymna), and best film score. Least surprising is the latter, given that it’s a musical comedy, which focuses on a Jazz Big Band in 1950s communist Poland. Fabian Apanowicz…

In 80 Million, the 2011 film from Waldemar Krzystek, Ocean’s 11 meets the Solidarity Movement in 1980s Poland. It’s fast paced, witty, fun and easy, yet driven by an idealism which the American blockbuster lacks. Directed by Waldemar Krzystek in 2011, it’s set the tone for a new way of approaching Poland’s experience of communism. ‘We didn’t…

The Little Prince – the classic novella by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – is about a pilot stranded in the Sahara desert, visited there by a child, the Little Prince of the title. The two form a friendship, and The Pilot learns of the life of his visitor, who hails from a tiny asteroid, in turn…

Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl collected the testimonies of survivors from the nuclear disaster: military personnel, medical professionals, and, most importantly, ordinary people. Her book is a series of stories that tell the untold: how little the people in the Soviet Union, and especially the Ukraine and Belarus, knew about what happened the night the…