Cineuropa sat down with Ewa Szabłowska, one of the artistic directors of mBank New Horizons IFF (the other one being Małgorzata Sadowska), to ask her about the highlights of the 24th edition, which unspools from 18-28 July in Wrocław, Poland. The event will present 285 films in 24 sections, amassing a total of 25,600 minutes of screening time.

Cineuropa: The festival’s theme this year is “cinema that leads” – can you elaborate?
Ewa Szabłowska: The inspiration came from one of the film sections, Let's Go, and an exhibition called Steps, because it's connected to the idea of walking. Maybe it's not really translatable in English, but in Polish, this slogan also refers to cinema that takes you along with it. In the main sections of the festival, we decided to focus on the philosophies, practices and ideas of walking, and how it’s represented in art and in cinema. And actually, you can say that in both of them, there’s a lot of walking happening.

In the programme, we show how differently films and filmmakers deal with walking – for example, in the structure of a movie, like a road movie that is “walkable”. But you can also have the “walk and talk” kind of films, such as Eric Rohmer’s Love in the Afternoon or Kazik Radwański's Matt and Mara. Actually, there’s a whole sub-genre of dating films that happen in cities, and people find out stuff about themselves, rather than about the cities.

The theme also relates to the festival itself, which boasts a lot of “paths”, or film sections. You can take shortcuts by going from one section to another, or you can just take the long road and delve into the retrospectives, which are very prominent this year: there are ones devoted to Alain Tanner, Nagisa Oshima, Bertrand Bonello and Yvonne Rainer. It's also a metaphor for the New Horizons IFF, with the slow cinema it presents – it’s about really walking on the screen, not rushing the narratives, and watching it carefully, almost frame by frame.

Walking can also be a form of exploration, and at a festival, it can be a way of discovering new ways of cinematic expression. How does the New Horizons international competition relate to that?
Our competition this year is more about psychonautic exploration. When I looked at all 12 films and was writing the introductory text, I realised that the majority of them take place in some type of liminal space, whether it's dreamscapes, or the one between life and death. They’re like real spaces, but they also linger on the experiences that have not been “lived in” very much. So, you could say that the competition is about exploring, but I don't know if it was my own impression or if it was the filmmakers who also, even after the pandemic, decided to linger on the phenomena of sleep or dreams, because it really translates well into the cinematic language.

We have Arcadia [+lee también:
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entrevista: Yorgos Zois
ficha de la película] by Yorgos Zois, Sleep with Your Eyes Open [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] by Nele Wohlatz and Ivo [+lee también:
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entrevista: Eva Trobisch y Adrian Camp…
ficha de la película] by Eva Trobisch, which is a realistic film but talks about taking care of terminally ill patients. We also have Zone [+lee también:
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entrevista: Christina Friedrich
ficha de la película] by Christina Friedrich, which is a trip down memory lane, delving into the story of her growing up in the Harz Mountains, but it’s also a romantic trip into the history of Germany. There's a lot of subterranean and a lot of subconscious stuff going on in our competition.

Two European countries get pride of place in this year’s programme: Romania, with the “Mirror Games” section, and Greece, which you mention a few times in your list of top-ten films at the festival. Are these two countries leading the way?
I think so. Romania is our country in focus, with a programme curated by Mihai Chirilov, the director of the Transilvania International Film Festival. He put together a very interesting focus called Romania, the Mirror Games, and he's taking contemporary Romanian films – like MMXX [+lee también:
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entrevista: Cristi Puiu
ficha de la película] by Cristi Puiu and Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World [+lee también:
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entrevista: Radu Jude
ficha de la película] by Radu Jude – and contrasting them with classical Romanian movies such as The Oak by Lucian Pintilie or Angela Goes On by Lucian Bratu. He talks about it in a very interesting way. The Romanian New Wave was one of the biggest things to happen in European cinema in the last 20 years.

And another big phenomenon that we have been witnessing is the Greek New Wave. Now, we call it the Greek Weird Wave. We have fresh films from Greece – Animal [+lee también:
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entrevista: Sofia Exarchou
ficha de la película] by Sofia Exarchou, the aforementioned Arcadia and September Says [+lee también:
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entrevista: Ariane Labed
ficha de la película] by Ariane Labed, which was produced in Ireland but has a “weird wave” vibe to it. And Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] is opening the festival. It’s not a Greek film per se, but everyone says that Lanthimos is coming back to his roots.