13/11/2015 - Cinematographers Chris Menges and Gunnar Fischer are being celebrated at the Polish festival in Bydgoszcz between 14 and 21 November

Even before it opens tomorrow (14 November), the Camerimage International Film Festival in Bydgoszcz, northern Poland, dedicated to the art of cinematography, has announced several of its main prizes.

US editor and sound designer Walter Murch, who won two Oscars for US director Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) and one for UK director Anthony Minghella's The English Patient (1996), will receive the Camerimage Special Award. “Editing is not about gimmicky transitions from one scene to another; it deals with imbuing the given story with a rhythm and emotional tempo, while designing a film's soundtrack does not mean matching images to music and songs, but creating a spatial soundscape that will make the world depicted on screen believable and tangible. Murch is a true master of both,” said the festival.

The Award for Outstanding Achievements in Documentary Filmmaking will go to Polish writer-director Marcel Lozinski, “a member of the generation of artists (notably including Krzysztof Kieślowski and Wojciech Wiszniewski) who mixed the traditional documentary filmmaker's ethos with elements of creation and artistic provocation”.

This year's Outstanding Cinematic Duo Award will be presented to Iranian director Majid Majidi and Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, whose Muhammad: The Messenger of God – part one of a planned trilogy about the life of the Prophet – will unspool at the festival. 

British cinematographer Chris Menges will be celebrated through a retrospective including seven films such as his own A World Apart (1988), UK director Roland Joffé's The Killing Fields (1984) and The Mission (1986), which both won an Oscar for Best Cinematography, and works by Ken Loach, Bill Forsyth and Neil Jordan. 

The festival's Remembering the Masters will this year screen a series of films that Swedish cinematographer Gunnar Fischer shot for Ingmar Bergman, including Summer with Monika (1953), Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), Wild Strawberries (1957) and The Seventh Seal (1957). 

Among the festival exhibitions are Bryan Adams Exposed, featuring 130 of the Canadian singer-songwriter's photographs of such figures as Sir Ben Kingsley, Mickey Rourke, Sir Mick Jagger, Lana Del Rey, Kate Moss, Tilda Swinton and Amy Winehouse, and a collection of works by US photographer Sandro Miller, comprising his series on US actor John Malkovich.

The Moving Camera: Why Is One Shot Better Than Another? is a seminar dealing with the Steadicam camera stabiliser, which US cinematographer Garrett Brown invented and used for more than 100 movies, starting with Hal Ashby's Bound for Glory and John G Avildsen's Rocky in 1975.

The Pixar production of US directors Pete Docter and Ronaldo del Carmen's fully animated adventure-comedy Inside Out – “the best possible example of the true beauty and infinite visual possibilities of the animated form” – will be scrutinised by directors of photography Patrick Lin and Kim White, and camera and staging lead Adam Habib.