Sundance’s Kim Yutani, and Directors’ Fortnight’s Gabriella Trujillo, along with execs from sales companies. including mK2, Coproduction Office, Reel Suspects and Be For Films will be among the industry execs taking part in Polish Days, the industry platform of the New Horizons International Film Festival, taking place in Wroclaw from July 21-23.
The event will showcase new films by Polish directors Aga Woszczyńska, Lukasz Ronduda and Damian Kocur.
Additionally, there will be closed screenings of four completed Polish films.
They are Jan P. Matuszyński’s Minghun, starring Marcin Dorocinski and Daxing Zhang shot in Polish, English and Chinese; director- painter Wilhelm Sasnal’s The Assistant, based on the Swiss writer Robert Walser’s eponymous novel from 1907; Adrian Panek’s biopic Simona Kossak about the Polish scientist, ecologist and activist who fought to protect Europe’s oldest forest; and Wieslaw Paluch’s film about the legendary Polish punk band KSU in Go Against The Flow.
Extracts of Minghun were shown as a work in progress at last year’s Polish Days.
This year’s works-in-progress showcase will present eight upcoming Polish productions, including Kamila Tarabura’s Travel Essentials, based on a true story about two women who must confront their past when they return to their birthplace, Aleksandra Maciuszek’s documentary Four Winters in Edificio Cuba, following the life of a hyperactive and insubordinate boy and his friends over the course of eight years in a tenement building in the historic quarter of Cuba’s Old Havana, and Dawid Torrone’s debut feature Dead By Dawn, a tribute to classic horror films with a modern twist
In development
Polish Days will provide local producers with an opportunity to find potential co-production partners or financiers for 10 projects in development.
Projects to be pitched will include Tell Me What You Feel by Lukasz Ronduda who won the Golden Lion at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia in 2022 for his last film Fears, co-directed with Lukasz Gutt.
Aga Woszczyńska’s drama set on a Baltic island, Black Water, her second feature after her debut Silent Land, is also being showcased, as is Jola Kudela’s animated feature A Door To The Woods. The latter is inspired by real people and true historical events during three oppressive regimes - Stalinism, Fascism and Communism - in Europe during the 20th century.
Polish Days will also feature two projects by Kocur whose debut film Bread And Salt premiered in Venice in 2022. The works-in-progress section will show footage from his second feature Under The Volcano which centres on a Ukrainian family on the last day of their holiday on Tenerife who are gradually transformed from tourists into refugees when their return home to Kyiv is thwarted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Under The Volcano received the FIXAFILM postproduction award at last year’s Polish Days.
In addition, Kocur is pitching La Manche, a drama set on the Polish-Belarussian border, which has also been presented at last November’s Connecting Cottbus East-West Co-Production Market.
Projects successfully presented at past editions of Polish Days have included The Last Family, Sweat, Corpus Christi as well as Woman On The Roof, Prime Time and Norwegian Dream.
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