Wroclaw takes off to "new horizons"
Over 430 films (including 230 features and 250 national avant-premieres) representing more than 50 countries: those are the figures for the 11th New Horizons International Film Festival, Poland’s largest film festival, which opened last night in Wroclaw and will run until July 31.
The New Horizons international competition comprises films which echo the festival’s title and belong to a strand of demanding and controversial auteur cinema. These 14 titles, unreleased in Poland, will vie for the Grand Prize (worth €20,000), the Audience Award and the FIPRESCI Prize.
Polish films are well represented among them, with Urszula Antoniak’s Code Blue [+see also:
trailer
film profile]; Paula Markovitch’s The Price [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (lensed by Polish DoP Wojciech Staroń); and Utopians by young Polish director and video artist Zbigniew Bzymek. Also in the competition line-up are two Greek films (Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg [+see also:
film review
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interview: Athina Rachel Tsangari
film profile] and Syllas Tzoumerkas’s Homeland [+see also:
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film profile]); an Austrian/Japanese co-production (Edgar Honetschläger’s The Beginning and End of All Things); Nanouk Leopold’s Brownian Movement [+see also:
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film profile] (Netherlands/Germany/Belgium); François-Jacques Ossang’s Dharma Guns [+see also:
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film profile] (Portugal/France); and Gravedigger by Hungarian director Sándor Kardos.
Another tradition at the Wroclaw festival is the international competition for films on art, which this year includes two interesting French titles: Pip Chodorov’s Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (a personal presentation of films admired by the director); and Jérôme de Missolz’s Kids of Töday (a snapshot of the post-punk generation of the 1970s and 1980s seen through the eyes of today’s young neo-punks). The 12 selected titles also include British conceptual artist Gillian Wearing’s Self Made, where the director shows the fruits of an experiment she carried out involving seven people.
(Translated from French)
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