Poland

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Henryk Goldszmit – aka, Janusz Korczak – was born in 1878 to a prosperous, assimilated Jewish family in Warsaw. Convinced from an early age that the rights of children needed defending, he studied pediatrics and organized a number of institutions for children, including a famous orphanage that he was forced to move into the Jewish ghetto after the Nazis invaded Poland. Yet he remained convinced that even the Nazis would not harm his children. Wajda’s moving, wrenching and highly controversial portrait of Korczak ponders the fate of a kind of modern saint in a world in which evil has become the rule. Brilliantly incarnated by Wojciech Pszoniak from a script by Agnieszka Holland, Korczak both fascinates and repulses. The man’s complete, unquestionable dedication to his children is set against a refusal to understand – or perhaps accept – the reality all around him. A thoughtful, provocative work that was clearly a key influence on Schindler’s List.Read More »

Autotranslated from Filmpolski:
A lyrical story about a holiday adventure of a man camping with his son at a lake: the unexpected appearance of a girl shatters the previously carefree mood. Father and son are vacationing on a deserted beach. The appearance of the girl shatters their peace and harmony. The father becomes more and more interested and affectionate towards the girl..Read More »

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A startling new vision of genius teenage angst.

The exceptionally gifted 15-year-old Staszek is about to start studying physics at a university specializing in the theory of parallel worlds. He has an extraordinary mind and a wounded soul, which his mother, who steers his life, seems incapable of healing. Then a Man appears in their lives and, as the Boy passes from the hands of the Mother into his care, a new order is established. Their torturous road forms a bond between the three central characters, but their shared happiness is not to last long.Read More »

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If Walt Disney, Todd Solondz, and David Lynch were to collaborate on a film, it might resemble Kuba Czekaj’s Baby Bump, a gruesome coming-of-age story that is never afraid to test the limits of cinema. Completely disregarded traditional filmmaking rules, the film finds its deranged cast interacting with its sarcastic quasi-narrator for a unique result.

It takes around ten minutes for Baby Bump to venture into immensely inappropriate territory, as a pre-teen girl offers to show a boy her “tits” in exchange for some marshmallows. The film only gets weirder and wilder from there, with Mickey House (Kacper Olszewski) trying and failing to grow up without horribly embarrassing himself. There isn’t much of a narrative. Instead, Baby Bump is comprised of a collection of somewhat intertwining scenes dealing with adolescence, body image, sexual identity, and mental health.Read More »

Minowo monastery is a modest place of poverty, yet full of magic. Five monks live here, three of them have qualities: each body radiates a different fruit.
One day, Natasha and five year old daughter Gienia visit the monastery. Natasha has a fix old painting talent. Little girl with one of the monks forged friendship. Monk quiet life becomes the girl’s curiosity and unrest.
This is a movie about love, full of sweet and fragrant … …Read More »

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24 hours in the bitter life of a frustrated divorced teacher who stays in the vicious circle of his numerous obsessions.

Marta Jazowska for culture.pl wrote:
Afilm portraying the painstaking life of a 44 year literature professor with obsessive-compulsive behaviour. Divorced, pedantic and frustrated his life consists of a series of rituals performed around the simplest every tasks. Capturing his unbearable stagnation and anger, the film is about isolation and lonelinessRead More »

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“We tried to draw a broad picture showing that the class which, theoretically at least, was said to be the ruling class, had somewhat different views from those which were printed on the front page of the Trybuna Ludu.”
— Krzysztof KieslowskiRead More »

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Life in Poland is satirized in this standard comedy drama about a group of people who take a short cruise together, a brief vacation along a river before the demands of life and work are faced again. The wide mix of passengers goes from one end of the personality spectrum to the other, and the close quarters make mingling, talking, and interacting all the easier. Sight gags and sharp wit keep the cruise, and the comedy, rolling along at a good pace.Read More »

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At the climax of Harold Pinter’s vaguely allegorical but wholly chilling play The Birthday Party, the broken hero is being taken away by strangers, no doubt to a bad place. The locals, who have no idea what sort of political act of terror is being committed, stand by helplessly, but one of them rises and says, “Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do!” Even though Pinter never makes a specific point of reference as to what deplorable regime is imposing its will, the viewer intuitively understands the message. So it is with Andrzej Zulawski’s The Devil. International audiences unfamiliar with Polish politics might not know or care that his horror film was based on actual events from the turbulent 1960s, during which communist authorities provoked a group of Warsaw students into staging anti-censorship protests. Read More »