The 15-to-18-years-old boys are forcefully dragged through a corridor of army men who beat them with sticks till they bleed. It is hard to watch the faces of the horrified boys even though we know they are actors. But when the frame becomes black and white and we watch images obtained from The Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) and see the faces of the boys whose story is the narrative of the movie, you can almost feel the audience tense up. The movie “Black Thursday,” is one of the 60 movies showing at the 23rd Polish Film Festival in America currently running in Chicago.
The PFF, a 16 day-long festival shows movies in seven venues around Chicago area and attracts 35,000 viewers every year, according to Patrycja Wierzba, PFF’s marketing coordinator. Although most of the movies shown at PFF are chosen to educate about Polish culture, history and tradition, the festival still manages to interest Polish and American community.
A scene from 'Black Thursday'
According to Zoran Samardzija, an assistant professor at Columbia College whose research is post-communist Eastern Europe cinema, the most used themes in contemporary Polish films are: the legacies of World War Two and the Holocaust, national history and identity, migration, Poland’s relationship to Western Europe and the legacies of communism. This year festival is showing 22 feature movies, 35 documentaries and three animations. In 12 of the feature movies and 21 of documentaries presented at the festival, at least one of the mentioned themes is the primary theme of the movie.
According to Wierzba, about 60 percent of festival’s audience is Polish and 40 percent American. Although the festival started in 1989 with screenings at The Polish Museum of America, today festival established itself on Chicago calendar and has media partners such as Chicago Tribune and WTTW11. According to Dan Soles, WTTW11 senior vice president and chief television content officer, WTTW11 decided to partner up with PFF as they believe the festival provides quality programming (“good stories and plots”) and brings the “wonderful productions” from Poland. WTTW11 has shown movies that are screened at the festival and according to Soles, they were met with positive feedback from the viewers and good ratings. Although “Katyn”, one of the movies shown at the previous festival and last year on WTTW11, is about the mass execution of Polish nationals carried out by the Soviet secret police in 1940, the movie still was seen by many viewers, many of them non-Poles, said Soles.
PFF organizers want to show movies that could be understood by non-Poles and would let the non-Polish audience feel “closer to Poland,” said Wierzba. The PFF board wants Polish and non-Polish audience to learn about Poland. “I lived in ’70s Poland and remember how it was, but still I did not know much about the events [in “Black Thursday”].” The movie tells the story of events that even some of the today Poles are unfamiliar with. During the communist regime the information about the brutality of Polish Army and militia at the workers’ strikes shown in the movie was unknown to public as regime leaders were in charge of media and communication. Since 1998 IPN is working to collect all of the remaining materials to build a historical account of events and make it accessible to public. As the director of “Black Thursday,” Antoni Krauze, said after the screening of the movie at the festival, “I used the everyman character that is often seen in American movies to tell the story. Someone who is not on the front lines of the battle yet becomes a victim.” With this approach Krauze hoped for more viewers to connect with the movie.
'Black Thursday' producer Kazimierz Beer and director Antoni Krauze discuss the movie with the PFF audience
According to Jan Lorys, director of The Polish Museum of America, Americans should have no trouble relating to Polish history shown in the movies at the festival. “It is like watching movies about Indians and cowboys, conflicts are always the same in every culture.” Lorys is happy that PFF exists in Chicago and says the festival gives people opportunity to watch the movie together and discuss it afterwards. This is good not only for the Polish community in Chicago but also for Americans, said Lorys.
According to Wierzba selection process for the PFF repertoire begins every June at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia, Poland. Krzysztof Kamyszew, a former president and a founder of PFF who is still on the executive board of the festival is one of the judges at the Gdynia festival. While in Poland he watches the movies and notes which ones would be good for the Chicago audience, said Wierzba. When Kamyszew is back in Chicago he discusses his and the executive board members’ choices and together they decide on the list. The goal: movies that tell a tale of Poland.
There is one movie that always makes the cut. Since 1994, every year the director of the Golden Teeth award winning feature film is guaranteed that his movie will show next year. Although an award is called the audience award the winning movie is chosen by seven judges. Six of them are chosen from the audience by PFF organizers. “We know who is in our audience,” said Wierzba, “we try to choose people who know more about movies.” According to Wierzba, they look for people involved in media or film industry who understand festival’s mission. A general public vote constitutes the seventh vote. Throughout the festival audience votes on their favorite movie and the movie that gets the most votes gets one vote. Last year the winning movie was “Little Rose” by Jan Kidawa-Blonski which was loosely based on poet Pawel Jasienica’s life. The poet fell in love and married a girl who worked as an informant for communist government and reported her husband’s every move to her superiors. Unfortunately, Kidawa-Blonski had no new movie this year and he lost his spot.
But some of the films have contemporary topics, said Wierzba. One of the movies dealing with issues in today’s Poland is “Dance Marathon.” A comedy about a crowd that has gathered for a dance competition in the provincial town of Dabie tells a story about a small town in Poland. One of the characters in the movie, a young girl, enters the competition to win and leave Poland for a better life in Ireland. According to Dublin24.net, a news website for Poles living in Ireland, currently, there is about 300,000 Poles working in Ireland. Ireland is the third country in the European Union (after Great Britain and Germany) with the largest Polish population, according to Polish Confederation of Private Employers Lewiatan. “Dance Marathon” was directed by Magdalena Lazarkiewicz, a sister of Agnieszka Holland (“Total Eclipse” and “The Secret Garden”).
Holland, like her sister, is one of Polish directors attending festival. Holland’s movie “In Darkness” comes out in February but Sony Classic who is the distributor of the movie made an exception and allowed the movie to be shown at the festival. According to Samardzija “In Darkness” is the classic example of Polish director choosing Holocaust as the primary theme in the movie. The movie tells the story of Holocaust in Lvov, a Polish city that is now part of Ukraine. Leopold Socha, a simple sewer worker and petty thief charges Jews for hiding them from Nazis in sewers, only later to discover unexpected emotional union with them. The movie is Poland’s entry for the upcoming Oscars.
And although Poland has yet to win an Oscar for the best movie, even though some people argue that it did with “Pianist” in 2002 (the movie was directed by Roman Polanski and shot in Poland with many Polish actors in it) Chicago community seems to appreciate Polish cinematography as an unvarying number of people show up every year to see movies about Poland, said Wierzba.
For more information about the festival and festival’s schedule please visit www.pffamerica.org.
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