Krakow 2023

During KFF Industry, award-winning film director/producer Agnieszka Zwiefka pitched her part-animated doc project Runa, about a 16-year-old Kurdish girl who, after her mother’s tragic death on the Polish-Belarussian border, must take care of her four younger brothers while coping with her own trauma, all the time trying to start a new life. The project was presented the FIXAFILM Post-production Award in Krakow.

A disturbing and brutal delve into the dark and violent underbelly of military conscription in Belarus as seen from the perspective of the country’s much put-upon youth, Motherland offers a striking – and deeply prescient – analysis of a system of bullying and abuse borrowed from neighbouring Russia, and how it is reflected in the country itself.

Ukrainian director Olga Stuga made an impassioned plea for her new project, which tells how families are split by the terrible decisions they are forced to make as a result of the war, whether to stay and be part of the struggle or leave and seek safety (and offer support to others) beyond Ukrainian borders. “My husband has been waiting for me in France for a year. I must decide to come back to him and live the life we had, or stay in Ukraine and continue being a voice that tells our Ukrainian stories.”

In this fascinating behind-the-scenes examination, world-premiering in Krakow, members of the legendary Workcenter theatre collective founded by Jerzy Grotowski – acclaimed as one of the 20th Century’s most influential theatre practitioners - speak frankly for the first time about their experiences related to the work methods he devised, and which were developed by his apprentice and Artistic Director Thomas Richards.

The Industry awards of Krakow 2023 were handed out June 2 within the Docs to Start and Docs to Go categories, for Polish documentary projects in development and in post-production respectively. KFF Industry ran May 29 to June 3. The 63rd Krakow Film Festival runs to 4 June in Kraków, and across Poland on the KFF VOD online streaming platform between 2 and 18 June.

Dutch Jessica Gorter’s new film tells the story of Yuri Dmitriev, a man who has dedicated his life to identifying and naming the tens of thousands who perished during the Great Terror under Stalin. “When I was in the middle of editing The Red Soul I got the phone call saying that he was arrested,” Gorter says. “I guess that was the moment when I really decided, ‘okay, so I need to make this film. I need to know where this is going.’”

Polish artist Agata di Masternak channels her crippling illness into creativity as a way of understanding how other people have coped with their own physical traumas. Małgorzata Kozera’s intriguing film Faces of Agata astutely examines di Masternak’s masterful balancing of art and pain, with the artist herself an engaging narrator of her own challenging life story.