POLISH FILMS IN IDFA PROGRAMME
The full programme of the prestigious IDFA festival has just been announced. In total, five Polish productions have made the cut. In addition to the previously announced Bloodline by Wojciech Węglarz, audiences at the Amsterdam event will have the opportunity to view The Guest by Zvika Gregory Portnoy and Zuzanna Solakiewicz, Trains by Maciej J. Drygas, Lift Lady by Marcin Modzelewski, and The Last Expedition by Eliza Kubarska.
The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) is the largest and one of the most significant documentary festivals worldwide. It annually attracts over 280,000 viewers, including more than 3,000 guests from the documentary industry, while films showcased at IDFA often go on to become festival favourites.
Five Polish productions have secured spots in this year's program. In the international short film competition, the jury will evaluate Wojciech Węglarz's Bloodline. You can read more about it here. Meanwhile, two titles have been invited to the international documentary competition. Competing for the top prize are The Guest by Zvika Gregory Portnoy and Zuzanna Solakiewicz, and Trains by Maciej J. Drygas. The former 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?
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?
The non-competitive Luminous section will feature The Last Expedition by Eliza Kubarska and the short film Lift Lady by Marcin Modzelewski. The protagonist of the feature-length documentary is Wanda Rutkiewicz, Poland's most outstanding alpinist, who went missing on 13 May 1992 en route to Kangchenjunga. Her body was never found. It's said that her mother claimed that if Wanda didn't return, it meant she had decided to join a Buddhist monastery. Director Eliza Kubarska, herself an alpinist, decides to retrace Wanda's final expedition. She speaks with witnesses of those events, confronting them with popular theories about Wanda's disappearance. Is it possible that the Himalayan climber is still alive? The film is narrated by Rutkiewicz herself, who kept an intimate audio diary about her travels.
In Modzelewski's film, we meet Mzia. When she was younger and Georgia had just regained independence after the fall of the Soviet Union, she fought as a sniper against Russian aggression in Abkhazia. Now, in her golden years, she operates a lift in a brutalist apartment block in Tbilisi. The lift serves the residents but can also be used to access a labyrinth of structures and a bridge leading to the upper part of the district. Mzia lives with her cat in a small room next to the lift shaft, where she monitors its operation on a grainy screen. However, when “her” lift breaks down, a tragicomic odyssey begins. Mzia can't contact a technician, and local authorities don't respond to calls or letters, so the conscientious lift operator must disappoint frustrated residents.
The full festival programme can be found on the event's official website.