52nd Krakow Film Festival

"The Flat" (Arnon Goldfinger)

For the last 52 years the Krakow Film Festival (Krakowski Festiwal Filmowy for our Polish-speaking readers) has been highlighting the picturesque city of Krakow through cinema, with a strong preference for the short format (for a long time, it was called The Krakow Short Film Festival/Festiwal Filmów Krótkometrażowych). The oldest film festival in Poland, it took place this year from May 28th to June 3rd, and offered so many titles, stories and images that it was very hard to determine how to fill up the optional free time between screenings. The town itself also had to be considered between the two main screening venues: the Mikro cinema and the Kijow Centrum.

Apart from the professional meetings, archive screenings and open air screenings, the festival had put together a huge programme of various styles and genres: two competitions for documentary, animation and fiction films (the national and the international short film selections), an international competition, with mid-length and feature-length films (20 films to be judged by the FIPRESCI jury), a retrospective focused on relatively unknown Polish documentary filmmaker Helena Třeštíková, whose film Rene (René) was often referred to during the festival, some premieres, a focus on Italy, a Polish Film Panorama, a programme of award—winning worldwide short films (Short Matters), the work of many Polish film schools gathered into a programme called Student Etudes Night, a European documentary programme (Somewhere in Europe)… All in all, so many different possibilities to establish connections between the Polish industry and the international professionals on site. (Katia Bayer)

52nd Krakow Film Festival (Poland, May 28 — June 3, 2012, www.krakowfilmfestival.pl). Jury: Katia Bayer, Belgium ("Format Court", "Vive le Cinéma"), Giovanni Ottone, Italy ("Osservatorio Brasile"), Miroslaw Przylipiak, Poland ("Kino").

FIPRESCI Prize: "The Flat" (Hadira) by Arnon Goldfinger (2011, Israel, 97') shown in the Documentary Competition Section. World sales: First Hand Films (Switzerland, Fritz Heeb — Weg 5, Zürich 8050, Switzerland, Phn: +41 44 312 20 60, Fax: +41 44 312 20 80, web: www.firsthandfilms.com, e-mail: info@firsthandfilms.com)

The Virgin, the Copts, and Me, or the Vices of Personal Documentary. Mirosław Przylipiak analyses Namir Abdel Messeeh's personal documentary and the problems of its genre.
An Extraordinary Family Story. Giovanni Ottone reviews the FIPRESCI Prize awarded Israeli documentary the Flat by Arnon Goldfinger.
Absorbing Israeli Documentaries. Katia Bayer Comments on the three impressive Israeli documentaries shown in competition.

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