09/10/2014 - Unspooling from 10-19 October, the Warsaw International Film Festival celebrates its 30th anniversary this year – and the CentEast Market its tenth

Opening tomorrow (10 October) with Canadian director David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars [+see also:
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making of
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“Instead of fireworks for the occasion, we decided to invite 20 Ukrainian directors, producers and festival programmers – with two prize contenders, Oles Sanin’s The Guide for the international competition and Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe [+see also:
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film profile] for the 1-2 Competition,” explained festival director Stefan Laudyn.

Ukraine will also be the Guest Country at the festival’s CentEast Market (17-19 October), this year organised for the tenth time, featuring ten Eastern European and seven Chinese works in progress, among other highlights. The Eastern European projects will also be presented in Moscow (20 October) and during the Beijing Film Market (April 2015).

Warsaw has selected 15 films for the international competition. Laudyn says they are “black comedies, dramas, historical films, love stories, crime, a road movie, and even a film about modern-day slavery”, including a local entry, the world premiere of Polish director Jan Jakub Kolski’s The Heart and the Sweetheart.

Other new Polish films on the line-up are Katarzyna Jungowska’s feature debut, Fanciful [+see also:
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film profile]; Tomasz Emil Rudzik’s German-Polish Agnieszka; Grzegorz Jankowski's Polish Shit; Janusz Mrozowski’s documentary The Authors; and Adam Bardach’s Totart, a biopic on his father, Gene Gutowski, a Holocaust survivor and Roman Polanski's film producer.

Besides the traditional competitions – international, 1-2 (for first and second features), Free Spirit (indie productions), documentaries and shorts – and the non-competitive special screenings, Discoveries (from other festivals) and Family Cinema Weekend sections, Laudyn last year added a new sidebar entitled Classics from Poland.

The first choices for this section are Ryszard Bugajski’s digitally restored Interrogation (1989), which was awarded at Cannes; Janusz Zaorski’s Matka Królów/The Mother of Kings (1987), a Silver Bear winner at the Berlinale; Feliks Falk’s Top Dog (1978); and Krzysztof Zanussi’s The Constant Factor (1980). Zanussi's new feature, Foreign Body [+see also:
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interview: Krzysztof Zanussi
film profile], will screen out of competition.

Running until 19 October, the Warsaw showcase closes with Polish director Waldemar Krzystek’s The Photographer.