Andrzej Wajda, 81, the dean of Polish filmmakers and generally recognized as one of the all time great film directors -- period -- will open the 32nd Polish Feature Film Festival in Gdynia on September 17. This long awaited dissertation on the egregious massacre of Polish officers (POW!) in WW II perpetrated by the Russians -- then cynically blamed by them on the Germans-- has been a pet project brewing in the mind of the Polish screen maestro for a number of years. The new Wajda opus will pr...

GDYNIA -- BLUES ON THE BALTICAlex Deleon, Sept. 15Although there are no international or Hollywood stars prancing around the premises there are enough Polish film celebrities and industry VIPs in attendance, and the 30th Jubilee mood is so high that the local papers have picked up the catch-phrase "Cannes on the Baltic". One reason for the upbeat atmosphere is the announcement by festival artistic director Maceij Karpinski, that after many years of quibbling and struggling the new Polish Cinema...

German author, Nobel Prize laureate Gunther Grass, is a high profile visitor here in connection with the screening of a new Polish film based on one of his novels, "The Call of the Toad". Grass was actually born in Dansk in 1927 when it was a German city known as Danzig, so this amounts to a kind of home-town visitation. His novel, "The Tin Drum" also had a WW II Danzig setting and was made into a highly acclaimed film by Volker Schloendorff in Germany (1979) which featured the Polish actor Dan...

2ND WARSAW JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL (MAY 19 -- 25, 2005)A ROUSING SUCCESSBy Alex Deleon-PevnyThe second convening of the new International Jewish Film Festival in Warsaw proved to be an even bigger success than the first edition a year ago. The official Polish designation, directly translated, comes out as "The Warsaw International Film Festival on Jewish Motifs" which seems to leave room for a broad interpretation of just what it is that counts as a "Jewish film". Indeed, as we shall see, some of ...