‘News’ Archives
Kinoteka 2010 highlights
London's 8th Kinoteka Polish Film Festiwal (sic), organised by the Polish Cultural Institute, has just announced dates and highlights. Spanning 4 March to 12 April 2010, it offers a cornucopia of delights including:An exploration of history past and present, looking at Poland under Communist rule; Borys Lankosz’s opening night film at the [...]
Pawel Łoziński DVD
The latest entry in NInA (formerly PWA)'s superlative Polish School of the Documentary (Polska Szkoła Dokumentu) has just been announced, and it's a survey of films by Pawel Łoziński, son of Marcel.The press release is currently in Polish only, but Culture.pl has an English-language career overview, and the two discs contain the following [...]
Daniel Szczechura DVD
After releasing four superbly-presented general overviews of Polish animation (Anthology of Polish Animation, Anthology of Polish Children's Animation, Anthology of Polish Experimental Animation and Action Animation), Poland's National Audiovisual Institute (NInA, formerly PWA) is finally making good on its promise to start focusing on individual [...]
Paradjanov Festival 2010
Here's some genuinely thrilling news - March 2010 sees a major multimedia retrospective of the unclassifiable work of the great Armenian-born Soviet-persecuted filmmaker-artist Sergei Paradjanov, to be staged in multiple venues across London and Bristol. The website is already pretty comprehensive, even though it doesn't include full timetables [...]
European Film Awards 2009
Though Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band) and Jacques Audiard's A Prophet (Un prophète) were the big winners at the 2009 European Film Awards, there were some pleasant surprises elsewhere on the list of winners. I was particularly pleased to see two of my favourite recent films, Peter Strickland's outstanding debut Katalin [...]
Polart: new Polish DVDs
Polart Video in the US have announced three new releases, one of which, Andrzej Wajda's Katyń, is widely available elsewhere (it's even out on Blu-ray in Poland), but I think the other two are exclusive to them.Much the most important is Wanda Jakubowska's The Last Stage (Ostatni etap, 1948), one of the first major films about the Holocaust, [...]
Lost Polish film discovered
A substantial chunk of a long-believed-lost Polish silent film from 1913 about the 1794 uprising against Prussia and Russia (a short-lived victory for the Poles before their country vanished as an independent nation between 1795 and 1918) has turned up in a flat in Kraków. Thenews.pl has the full story - and it looks like being the most [...]
Snow White subtitles
There seems to be quite a bit of confusion (not to mention outright contradiction) on various Polish retail sites about whether or not English subtitles are included on Epelpol's DVD and Blu-ray releases of Xawery Żuławski's Snow White and Russian Red (Wojna polsko-ruska), the film that won the New Polish Cinema prize at Era New Horizons in [...]
Polanski bailed
A Swiss court has accepted Roman Polanski's plea to be freed on $4.5m bail from a Swiss jail where he is being held for a US child sex case.The BBC News site has the full story.
Alpine alliances
A three-day co-production market is being staged as a sidebar of the Les Arcs Film Festival in the eponymous French ski resort.Projects being discussed and hopefully packaged include new features from Attila Gigor (whose The Investigator was one of the brightest Hungarian debuts in recent years), his compatriots Bálint Kenyeres, Réka Kincses and [...]