‘Countries’ Archives
Polish Paths to Freedom: Sparks of Hope (screening times)
Further to my post last week about the Imperial War Museum's ambitious, very welcome and entirely free series of screenings of Polish films illuminating the country's post-1970s history, they've now confirmed dates and screening times. You can download a PDF document here, but I'm sure they won't mind me reproducing the details for easier [...]
100 Years of Polish Cinema
My friend Kamila has just told me about this extraordinary site, inspired by the Polish Film Institute's commemoration of Polish cinema's centenary (the first truly Polish film is believed to date from 1908). I've only skimmed it so far, but it looks like a fascinating and valuable resource, consisting as it does of individual pages devoted to [...]
Polish Paths to Freedom: Sparks of Hope
Just over a year ago I posted details about the second instalment of the Imperial War Museum's enterprising Polish Paths to Freedom season - a series of films illustrating aspects of twentieth-century Polish history from various perspectives, fiction and non-fiction, contemporary and historical, you name it.They've just announced the line-up for [...]
Check the Gate 2009
The second Check the Gate festival of Hungarian films in London will take place from 25th to 30th June. While last year's line-up consisted of six relatively recent titles, this year they've upped the total to ten and there's a much greater concentration on acknowledged classics, dating back forty years to the late Péter Bacsó's delicious The [...]
Švankmajer in Manchester
Well, not the man himself, but a rare chance to see some of Jan Švankmajer's shorts in 35mm, preceded by a talk from yours truly about the use of movement in his films. It's part of the concurrent Moves09 festival, which this year is exploring the narrative possibilities of movement on screen. I'm still finalising the details, so I can't give [...]
The East End Film Festival
The 2009 East End Film Festival launches tomorrow - in the words of the organisers:The East End Film Festival showcases hot new talent and homegrown films alongside larger independent releases and special events, informing and inspiring a new generation of filmmakers and audiences from across London and beyond, and raising the profile of this [...]
Polish Cinema Conference – call for papers
Polish Cinema in an International Context, a two-day international conference, is being held on 4-5 December 2009, courtesy of Cornerhouse Manchester, the University of Central Lancashire, Preston, the University of Salford and sponsored by the Polish Cultural Institute and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. The conference will be accompanied by a [...]
43.3km Transylvanian Timber
My second review for the London International Documentary Festival website is of Georg Tiller and Claudio Pfeifer's almost wordless Austrian meditation about two very diverse professions - logging and border patrolling - operating in the same remote valley in Romania, inaccessible except by narrow-gauge railway. Much of it played out to me like [...]
Teethful Smile
Uśmiech zębiczny 1957, black and white, 2 minsHalf a minute longer than his first completed film Murder (Morderstwo, also 1957), Teethful Smile (also known as Teeth Smile and Toothy Smile) is a more complex piece of work, though it's based on a similar concept of exploring voyeuristic impulses. Here, though, there's a voyeur onscreen as well [...]
Murder
Morderstwo Poland, 1957, black and white, 1 minSome artists find their characteristic themes and approaches some distance into their career, while others emerge seemingly fully formed. Roman Polański so unambiguously falls into the latter group that the authorship of his first batch of Łódź Film School shorts (literally the first films he [...]