Yikes, can it already be 30 years since Lech Walesa successfully led the Polish freedom movement, Solidarnosc, against the repressive Communist Regime and paved the way to liberty in the other Central and Eastern European satellite countries*
This year’s edition of the KINOPOLSKA festival paid tribute the 30th anniversary of the historic Solidarity movement.
The KINOPOLSKA Festival promotes contemporary Polish cinema, and this year, celebrated the ...
It is not stretching to declare the director Andrzej Wajda is indeed one of Poland's great cultural treasures. Well into his eighties, Wajda remains a current and consistent icon of European cinema. His last film, a meditation on one of the great tragedies of World War II, the massacre of Polish officers by the invading Russians in the film Katyn, was nominated for an Oscar last year. It is one of many international prizes the director has garnered in a career that spans over five decades, inclu...
Friday, October 24------It is not stretching to declare the director Andrzej Wajda is indeed one of Poland's great cultural treasures. Well into his eighties, Wajda remains a current and consistent icon of European cinema. His last film, a meditation on one of the great tragedies of World War II, the massacre of Polish officers by the invading Russians in the film Katyn, was nominated for an Oscar last year. It is one of many international prizes the director has garnered in a career that sp...
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...
The 33rd edition of the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) initiated its marathon 24 day run on Friday, May 25, with 18 films bursting out of the starting gates at six festival venues strategically located around the city from the landmark Space Needle to the University District (and a seventh across the lake in satellite city Bellevue). The opening event I chose to attend was "An Evening with Lisa Gerrard", hypnotic Australian song-bird/composer, introducing the screening of a mystico-...
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 ...
