KINOTEKA Polish Film Festival

KINOTEKA Polish Film Festival

Now in its 11th year, the KINOTEKA Polish Film Festival opens 7 March. Running until 17 March the event offers visitors an opportunity to view the best of Polish Cinema and the visual arts. Taking place across several cities the venues include, the Barbican, Riverside Studios, Tate Modern, Curzon Soho, The National Gallery, Queens Film Theatre Belfast, FACT Liverpool and Edinburgh Filmhouse.

The year’s programme covers insightful and inspiring screenings, exhibitions, interactive workshops and masterclasses. With a spotlight on the work of some of Poland’s leading visual artists and designers, the festival spans hand painted animation, experimental artist video, digital illustration and poster design, with works from 1960 to the present day.

KINOTEKA have commissioned top designer Tomasz Opasinski to produced their event poster. Opasinski was born in Poland, 1975, and he has made a name for himself in Hollywood with an impressive resume, having worked on over 400 stunning film and gaming ad campaigns over the past decade including Prometheus, Paris Je T’aime, The Bourne Ultimatum and King Kong to name but a few. His excellence in Photoshop and digital illustration has been recognised by many professional bodies and his peers.

Tate Modern will be hosting a screening retrospective from pioneering Polish film and video artist Wojciech Bruszewski. Across Realities is an overview of his groundbreaking moving image experiments in perception curated by Lukasz Mojsak of the Filmoteka Museum of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Sadly passing away in 2009, Bruszewski left a fascinating body of work . Along with his fellow structural rebels active under the umbrella of the Workshop of the Film Form at the famous Film School in Lodz in the 1970s (including Jozef Robakowski and Pawel Kwiek), Bruszewski’s investigations into various dimensions of reality and perception left an immense imprint on Polish Experimental film in the decades to follow.

Whereas Witold Giersz, one of the masters of Polish animation, will be presenting his acclaimed films at the National Gallery. The event includes the UK premiere of his latest commission, Signum, an animated cave painting using traditional materials of charcoal on rock slabs, inspired by the Palaeolithic art at the caves of Lascaux and Altamira. The filmmaker began his career in the 1950s and includes 50 films, and more than 60 awards and honours from international festivals including Cannes and Oberhausen.

In line with the Giersz retrospective, KINOTEKA are presenting a free 4-day animation workshop event for children in collaboration with the London International Animation Festival at the Riverside Studios. Participants will practice drawing, painting, creating characters, sets and backgrounds and learn how to use the animation equipment to produce their own short animated films. They will also get the chance to watch Witold Giersz’s films and to meet and talk to the director himself, when he visits the workshop on the 17th March.

KINOTEKA is both a celebration of great Polish Filmmakers and an educational trip through the Polish film landscape.

KINOTEKA Polish Film Festival, 7 – 17 March, various locations across the UK.

Credits
Poster courtesy of KINOTEKA Polish Film Festival and Tomasz Opasinski.