Kino Polska: New Polish Cinema

Kino Polska: New Polish Cinema features seven films, including three New York premieres, highlighting directors who are revitalizing contemporary Polish cinema. The series brings together the best new works by Poland’s boundary-pushing women filmmakers.

The series opens with Agnieszka Holland and Katarzyna Adamik’s „Spoor” (2017). The critically acclaimed eco-thriller was Poland’s 2018 Oscar submission and winner of the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. The film centers on a teacher and animal rights activist living in a remote mountain village who becomes involved in a murder mystery surrounding the recent deaths of several local hunters.

Kino Polska also includes Agnieszka Smoczynska’s 2015 comedy-horror-musical „The Lure”. Smoczynska’s film about two man-eating siren sisters who come ashore looking for love is a feminist reworking of The Little Mermaid, mixing fairy tale, horror, and musical genre elements to create a freaky and completely distinctive feature film debut.

Writer-directors Joanna Kos-Krauze and Krzysztof Krauze’s „Birds Are Singing in Kigali” (2017) tells the emotionally aching story of two women—a Tutsi refugee and the Polish woman who helped her escape Rwanda—as each undertakes the emotional journey of adjusting to life in Polish society while coming to terms with unimaginable trauma.

„The Art of Loving” (2017), director Maria Sadowska’s second feature film, tells the true story of Michalina Wislocka, a pioneering Polish gynecologist who defied Communist authorities to lead Poland’s sexual revolution in the 1970s. The Art of Loving—which takes its name from Wislocka’s groundbreaking book and Communist Europe’s first guide to sexuality— was one of the highest grossing Polish film of 2017.

Malgorzata Szumowska’s „Mug” (2018), this year’s Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear award winner, makes its New York Premiere at BAM. Mug follows a man who undergoes a complete facial transplant after being severely injured while helping construct the world’s largest statue of Jesus.

Kino Polska also includes the New York premieres of Marta Minorowicz’s „Zud” (2016), a coming of age story set in Mongolia, about an 11-year-old boy who trains a wild stallion for a horse race that could save his family from financial ruin, and Anna Jadowska’s „Wild Roses” (2017). Featuring a soul-bearing central performance from lead actress Marta Nieradkiewicz, Wild Roses depicts a woman whose life reaches a crisis point as she deals with the pressures of motherhood, marriage, and an explosive secret.

From the Polish Cultural Institute