POLISH DOCUMENTARIES TAKE IDFA BY STORM
Trains directed by Maciej J. Drygas has been crowned the best feature-length documentary of the festival. The film also scooped the award for best editing, courtesy of the director himself, whilst the accolade for best cinematography went to "The Guest" by Zuzanna Solakiewicz and Zvika Gregory Portnoy.
The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) is the largest and one of the most prestigious documentary festivals in the entire world. Each year, it draws in over 280,000 guests, including more than 3,000 professionals from the documentary industry. Films showcased at IDFA often go on to become festival favourites.
The winning Trains opens with a quote from Franz Kafka: “There is hope, infinite hope – just not for us.” These words hover like a dark cloud over this documentary composed of archival materials, which creates a collective portrait of people in 20th-century Europe, capturing their hopes, desires, dramas, and tragedies. Times change, but the pattern keeps repeating. The archival footage in Maciej J. Drygas's silent film evokes an inevitable sense of a cycle of joy and destruction, beauty and bitterness. The image of a tangle of railway tracks and switches raises the question: which path will humanity choose?
Lauded for best cinematography, The Guest by Zvika Gregory Portnoy and Zuzanna Solakiewicz delves into the events at the border between Poland and Belarus. In 2021, refugees became pawns in a political game: Belarus promised them free access to the EU, but in Poland, they faced brutal pushbacks forcing them to return to Belarus. There, they were once again directed back to the Polish border, creating a nightmarish, unresolved stalemate stretched across a hostile, swampy terrain. The documentary's protagonist, Maciek, lives with his family on the Polish side of the border and provides shelter to an exhausted Syrian refugee, 27-year-old Alhyder. As Alhyder regains his strength, he faces a difficult question: what now? Where can he go without endangering himself or Maciek?
You can find the list of all awarded films here.