Carnage by Roman Polanski / Main Competition

Three Polish accents appeared in the line-up of the 68th Venice International Film Festival. Bóg zemsty (Carnage) by Roman Polanski was selected to the main competition and will fight for the Golden Lion. The film will have its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. It's a story based on Yasmina Reza's Tony Award-winning comedy God of Carnage, starring John C. Reilly, Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz. The film follows two sets of parents who meet up to talk after their children have been in a fight that day at school. The cultural conversation at some point starts to get out of control. Polish co-producer on ‘Carnage' is SPI International Polska. The director of photography is Paweł Edelman.

Land of Oblivion by Michale Boganim / Film Critic’s Week

In the line-up of the International Film Critic's Week which is another non-competitive section of the Venice festival appeared Znieważnona ziemia (La terre outragée/Land of Oblivion) by Michale Boganim. It's a French/German/Ukrainian/Polish co-production starring Andrzej Chyra in one of the leading roles and with Leszek Możdżer's music. The Polish co-producer on this project is Apple Film Production. As a debut Land of Oblivion also has a chance to win the Lion of the Future.The film retraces the irreversible consequences of the accident at Chernobyl nuclear power station in 1986. The organizers of the International Film Critic's Week wrote that Land of Oblivion is "the highest quality debut".

My Name is Ki by Leszek Dawid / Venice Days

Leszek Dawid's feature debut Mam na imię Ki (My Name is Ki) will be screened at the Venice Days - a non-competitive section for independent film productions during the 68th Venice International Film Festival. The Venice Days selectors have chosen 12 movies. One of them will get an honorable mention of the Europe Cinemas connected with a distribution support. All debut films shown during the Venice festival compete for the Luigi De Laurentiis Venice Award - Lion of the Future. The winner will get 100 000 euros.

My Name Is Ki has already been presented at the Polish Films Festival in Gdynia where Roma Gąsiorowska got the award for the best actress in a leading role. My Name Is Ki is a film portrait of a girl who tries not to follow her mother's pattern of a single woman having a child. She wants to live a full life - fast and intense. Ki meets Miko. The difficult relation between those two helps Ki to grow up and start loving and being responsible for herself and her son. The organizers of the Venice Days have written that My Name Is Ki is "a unique portrait of woman, almost an emblem of this edition".

All films were supported by the Polish Film Institute.

The 68th Venice International Film Festival starts on August 31st and ends September 10th.

ROMA GĄSIOROWSKA – POLISH UPCOMING FILM STAR

Photo still from “My Name Is Ki” by courtesy of Skorpion Arte

She made her stage debut in 2003 in Krzysztof Jaworski’s Disco Pigs at Rozmaitości Theatre.

In the same year she started her career on the big screen with FORECAST FOR TOMORROW (Pogoda Na Jutro) directed by Jerzy Stuhr.

She recently appeared in Xawery Żuławski’s SNOW WHITE AND RUSSIAN RED (Wojna polsko-ruska) where she showed her yet another face,

“ZERO” by Paweł Borowski and “Suicide Room” by Jan Komasa.

The 11. New Horizons International Film Festival wrapped up on Sunday, 31 July with the Polish premiere of Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live in.

During 11 festival days 483 movies (of which 228 were full-lenght) from 44 countries were shown. 240 of them had their Polish premieries in Wrocław. There were 542 screenings in total. Around 111 000 spectators participated in the festival.

157 foreign film directors, actors, producers, sales agents and distributors and 241 Polish guests have come to Wrocław, among them, the Hungarian director Béla Tarr - creator of the legendary Satan Tango. He came to present his newest film - The Turin Horse and run a masterclass for the festival audience.

The most prominent Korean film director, author of The Bow and Samaritan Girl, Kim Ki-duk also came to the festival. The 11. New Horizons IFF was honoured to welcome award-winning directors such as Bruno Dumont, Anja Breien, German experimental film author Werner Nekes, Terry Gilliam and Polish animator Mariusz Wilczyński. A short visit of Asghar Farhadi, the author of the Golden Bear-winning film Nader and Simin, A Separation surprised the audience attending the opening ceremony, where the film was screened.

The festival hosted five competitions this year- New Horizons International Competition,

Films On Art International Competition, New Polish Films Competition, Polish Short Films Competition and European Short Debuts Competition.

In the New Horizons Internatonal Competition the Jury (Anocha Suwichakornpong, Denis Côté, Hugo Vieira da Silva, Frédéric Boyer, Mariusz Grzegorzek) chose from 14 films. The festival Grand Prix and 20 000 € prize was given to Attenberg (Greece 2010) directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari. Special Award. A special mention was handed to Sándor Kardos's Gravedigger (A sírásó, Hungary 2010). Brownian Movement (Netherlands / Germany / Belgium 2010) directed by Nanouk Leopold won the The International Film Guide award.

For the second time in festival's history film critics from the International Federation of Film Critics handed the prestigious FIPRESCI Award to Gravedigger by Sándor Kardos. The FIPRESCI jury included Carmen Gray, Kira Taszman and Anita Piotrowska.

The Audience Award went to the debut of Argentinian director Paula Markovitch The Prize (El premio, Mexico / France / Poland / Germany 2011).

In the Films On Art International Competition the Jury (Roe Rosen, Gaspard Kuentz, Cédric Dupire, Tomasz Budzyński, Werner Nekes) gave the 10 000 € prize to Arirang (South Korea 2011) directed by Kim Ki-duk. The Jury gave also a Special Mention to the film Pyuupiru 2001-2008 (Japan 2010) directed by Daishi Matsunagi.

Thanks to the awards, Attenberg, Arirang, Gravedigger and The Prize have guaranteed distribution in Polish cinemas by the New Horizons Association, the organizer of the festival.

In the New Polish Films Competition, the Wrocław Film Award (including 100 000 PLN, 60 000 for the producer, and 40 000 for the director) funded by the president of Wrocław, by the jury verdict was handed to the film by Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal It Looks Pretty from a Distance. The prize of the Lower Silesia Voivodeship Marshall (40 000 PLN) for the best debut was handed to Jan Komasa for Suicide Room with the verdict of an international jury (Györgi Pálfi, Martin Blaney, Dimitri Eipides).

The European Short Debuts Competition in the category of animation was won by I Am Round (Jag är rund, Sweden 2011) by Mario Adamson, the best documentary chosen by the audience was The Chief (Il Capo, Italy 2010) directed by Yuri Ancarani. The Runaway (La Huida, Spain 2009) directed by Victor Carrey recieved the most votes in the category of feature films.

In the Polish Short Films Competition winners were chosen by the audience. Shivering Trunks directed by Natalia Brożyńska was named the best animation. 3 Days Of Freedom directed by Łukasz Borowski was the best documentary, while Basia From Podlachie by Aleksander Dembski won the title of the best fiction.

The 11.New Horizons IFF held retrospectives of Terry Gilliam, Andrzej Munk, Jack Smith, Bruno Dumont, Mariusz Wilczyński, Werner Nekes. The audience had a chance to take a closer look at the Norwegian cinema and especially on the work of Anja Breien in the Norway Expanded cycle. In the Midnight Madness section the audience enjoyed 'Round Midnight cult films. For the first time Japenese pink movies were shown to the Polish audience.

Industry

The festival was full of meetings with directors, critics, artists, discussion panels and lectures. A special place was created for film professionals - 170 industry guests were present in Wrocław, among them programmers from Berlinale, Rotterdam, Cannes, Venice, Thessaloniki, Toronto, Hong-Kong, Leeds, Edinburgh and Cottbus film festivals, as well as buyers, producers and sales agents.

Key companies present at the festival were Trust Nordisk, Memento, Wide Management, LevelK, Opus Film, Maipo, TVP, Polsat, Canal+, Soda Pictures, Malavida, Second Run DVD, Best Film and Gutek Film.

For the second time Wrocław hosted the New Horizons Studio - an initiative for young film professionals, designed to explain the workings of the international film market. 22 participants from 5 countries took part in lectures by renowned speakers, such as Hayet Benkara, Richard Kwietniowski (writing and directing), Ivana MacKinnon (producing), Ri Chakraborty, Anais Clanet (Wide Management), Beata Mońka (Canal+) and Hugo Viera da Silva (Swans). Co-organizers of the workshop were Media Desk Poland and London Film Academy.

Another key industry event was the Polish-Norwegian Co-Production Forum, which saw 80 participants - producers, film funds, distributors and buyers - meeting in Wrocław and discussing 10 projects that could posssibly become Polish-Norwegian co-productions.

11. New Horizons IFF was acompanied by five Polish book publications: Behind the Pink Curtain by Jasper Sharp, Midnight Movies by J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Norwegian Cinema (ed. Jan Erik Holst, Paweł Urbanik), Terry Gilliam's Wunderkamera (ed. Kuba Mikurda) and Animated Blues of Mariusz Wilczyński (Jerzy Armata).

11. New Horizons IFF was full of music events. On the July 29, 3000 people participated in a performance of Nick Cave and his band Grinderman. Everyday, the festival club located in the City Museum at the Arsenal hosted concerts and DJ sets. The T-Mobile Music Scene has seen shows by the legendary american hip-hop group, Anti-Pop Consortium and the leaders of the Norwegian music scene - Jaga Jazzist, Susanne Sundfør and Supersilent.

During the festival the following exhibitions were shown: All the Women of the World Are in Me! - Ane Lan, Pinku eiga - Personal Art - Witold Liszkowski, Rub your Eyes. From the collection of Werner Nekes.

12. New Horizons IFF will be held from 19 till 29 July 2012. Part of the 12th edition will be a review of new Mexican cinema and a retrospective of its famous representative Carlos Reygadas. Other retrospectives include films by the Serbian director Dušan Makavejev, Austrian director Ulrich Seidl and the avant-garde author Peter Tscherkassky.

The main festival partner and sponsor was Polska Telefonia Cyfrowa, operator of the polish T-Mobile network. The main patron was the City of Wrocław. Mercedes was the official car of the event.

WARSAW: The Play Poland Film Festival (http://playpoland.org.uk) will be bring Polish cinema to audiences in Scotland from 2 August to 25 September with screenings in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Sponsored in part by the Polish Film Institute (www.pisf.pl ) the mobile festival will continue in other UK cities including Oxford, Birmingham, Liverpool and Belfast until December 2011.

WARSAW: The team behind the award-winning Rabbit a la Berlin has begun shooting the concept documentary Six Degrees, which takes a literal and exploratory look at the theory that everyone is connected via only six degrees of separation.

WARSAW: Paris based international sales outfit Wide Management has added Rafael Lewandowski’s The Mole to its strong line-up. The Mole with will be released theatrically in Poland on 5 August is produced by Warsaw based Metro Films (www.metrofilms.com) and is the first feature film by Lewandowski who has made a name for himself as a doc maker. The film is about a miner who is a Solidarity member and is falsely accused being a member of the secret police.

SOFIA: Bulgarian films continue their international success story with seven Bulgarian films due to participate in the 17th edition of Sarajevo Film Festival (22-30 July 2011) in the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bulgarian filmmakers manage to succeed despite the ongoing struggle for funding in Bulgaria

BUCHAREST: The first edition of a new TV content market, the Golden Carpathian Market, is set for 25-28 August 2011 in Ploiesti in the Carpathian region of Romania. The event is a regionally-focused business market for the TV and digital media content industries from Central and East Europe plus Middle East and Middle Asia countries.

It is a feature debut of Rafael Lewandowski and the cinematographer credit goes to Piotr Rosołowski. “The Mole” was produced by Metro Films and co-produced by KUIV Productions, Silesia-Film, Non Stop Film Service, Le Frensoy – studio national des arts contemporains, Vertigo, Trafik. The film received the financial support from the Polish Film Institute and City of Bielsko-Biała.

The 35^th Montreal WFF runs from August 18 through 28 and makes the only “A” class film festival on the North American continent. The goal of the festival is to encourage cultural diversity and understanding among nations, to foster the cinema of all continents by stimulating the development of quality cinema, to promote filmmakers and innovative works, to discover and encourage new talents, and to promote meetings between cinema professionals from around the world. This year’s edition of the festival will present over 400 films from 70 countries. A last year Special Jury Prize went to “Venice” by Jan Jakub Kolski.

“The Mole” tells the story of Paweł (played by Borys Szyc) who is the son of a 'Solidarity' activist. His wife is Ewa, the daughter of a miner who had been killed during mine strike riots under communism. One day a photo of Paweł's father (Marian Dziędziel) is published in a paper. He is accused of having collaborated with the communist secret police in the 1980s (with "The Mole" as his code name), and of having informed on his collegues during the strike.

The film was screened in the main competition of the 36^th Polish Film Festival in Gdynia and Marian Dziędziel won an award for the Best Actor In Supporting Actor. The film also stars: Wojciech Pszoniak, Magdalena Czerwińska, Sławomir Orzechowski and Bartłomiej Topa.

The distribution of Rafael Lewandowski’s film in Poland is handled by Kino Świat. The film is set for the theatrical release in Poland on August 5^th.

The world rights are handled by the Wide Management.

Two Łódź productions: Opowieści z chłodni by Grzegorz Jaroszuk and Bez śniegu by Magnus von Horn will screen in the Pardi di domani / Leopards of Tomorrow short film competition of the 64^th Locarno International Film Festival, one of the key film events in the world. Locarno's International Competition lineup also includes the feature animation, Polish – Romanian co-production, Crulic - Droga na drugą stronę (Crulic), directed by Anca Damian. The film will have its world premiere during the Festival. The film was partly shot in Poland, while Krakow area based Studio Alvernia handled post-production. The film's Polish co-producer is the Magellan Foundation. All three films were supported by the Polish Film Institute.

The 64^th Locarno International Film Festival runs from August 3 through 13.

One of the Leopards of Tomorrow competition jury members is Luc Toutoungh, co-producer of Świteź (The Lost Town of Świteź) by Kamil Polak, which will also screen in Locarno.

Both competition short films already have a history of success. Produced by the National Film School in Łódź and by EasyBusyProductions, Opowieści z chłodni won the Targowa Street Film&Music Festival in Łódź. In April, the film won the Grand Prize and Audience Award at the "Łodzią po Wiśle" film festival in Warsaw. The film will also screen in the Polish Shorts section of the upcoming New Horizons film festival. Opowieści z chłodni is a tongue-in-cheek story about two supermarket employees who have two days to find their purpose in life.

Bez śniegu, produced by the National Film School in Łódź and by Lava Films, previously won the Lucjan Bokiniec Grand Prize in the Young Cinema Competition at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia, the Silver Hobbyhorse at the Krakow Film Festival, and 1^st prize, the second most important award at "Łodzią po Wiśle". Inspired by real events, Magnus von Horn's film focuses on circumstances that led to a man shooting two boys in his backyard.

MALTA: The 13 part TV series Sinbad the Sailor produced by UK based Impossible Pictures for SKY TV will pump over 8 m euros into the Malta economy according to Malta Finance Minister Tonia Fenech.