Mateusz Kudła and Anna Kokoszka-Romer’s Polański, Horowitz. Hometown will open the 61st Krakow Film Festival on May 30. An international premiere, the film also competes in the festival’s Polish Competition.
Polański, Horowitz. Hometown is described as “a colourful story about childhoods, friendship, the common Jewish fate of the protagonists and, most of all, about Krakow – a place that, despite the passage of time and many changes, remains their home… After several dozen years, the protagonists finally manage to meet in their home city. They wander around Krakow following the footsteps of their wartime experiences. They wander the streets of Kazimierz and the former ghetto, visit the homes where they spent their boyhood, remember those who are no longer there, but also those who survived the Holocaust.”
“For the opening of the festival, we try and select spectacular films, as well as such which constitute a kind of common denominator for the festival programme,” comments Krzysztof Gierat, director of the Krakow Film Festival. “In the film Polański, Horowitz. Hometown there are many threads that are particularly dear to us — emotions, humour, nostalgia and Krakow as the witness of the events, but also as the setting of the film.”
Comments co-director and producer Anna Kokoszka-Rome of the film’s subjects: “They visit familiar places, sharing their most personal childhood and youth memories that shaped future artists. Their return to Krakow evokes in them the feelings for which they were not prepared. The protagonists also return to the traumatic moments from their childhood.”
The documentary came to international attention in 2020 when the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations to the family who sheltered Polański in a village near Wadowice during the war. The director gave personal testimony after meeting their grandson, whom the filmmakers found.
The festival further underlines how Ryszard Horowitz owes his life to another Righteous Among the Nations — Oskar Schindler, whose story was made famous by Steven Spielberg in the Academy Award-winning Schindler’s List. The German factory owner saved over a thousand Jews from the Holocaust, including the future photographer and his sister Bronisława “Niusia” Horowitz-Karakulska, who is also in the film. However, the future photographer did not escape deportation to a German concentration camp. Ryszard, a few years old at the time, was one of the youngest prisoners to survive Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Polański, Horowitz. Hometown is made by KRK FILM and supported by the Fund for the Support of Creativity of ZaiKS, the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany in Krakow and the WFDiF.
