Nick Cunningham

The prizes of the 63rd Krakow Film Festival were handed out June 3, with Nick Read and Ayse Toprak’s My Name is Happy winning best film in International Competition. In National Competition, the top prize went to Mateusz Pietrak for Basia: Three Short Stories. The Krakow FF Recommendation for the European Film Award in the Documentary category is Songs of Earth by Margreth Olin (Norway).

The Industry awards of Krakow 2023 were handed out June 2 within the Docs to Start and Docs to Go categories, for Polish documentary projects in development and in post-production respectively. KFF Industry ran May 29 to June 3. The 63rd Krakow Film Festival runs to 4 June in Kraków, and across Poland on the KFF VOD online streaming platform between 2 and 18 June.

Małgorzata Goliszewska’s new feature project, and winner of the SMAKJAM Award at Krakow FF Industry, tells a remarkable story of Grażyna Malczyk, a former opera singer who lost her voice, and who now dedicates her life to treating sufferers of extreme stuttering, and for whom Grażyna’s method represents the last chance for a normal life.

During KFF Industry, award-winning film director/producer Agnieszka Zwiefka pitched her part-animated doc project Runa, about a 16-year-old Kurdish girl who, after her mother’s tragic death on the Polish-Belarussian border, must take care of her four younger brothers while coping with her own trauma, all the time trying to start a new life. The project was presented the FIXAFILM Post-production Award in Krakow.

German Werner Herzog is an acknowledged master of European cinema, with a body of work comprising more than 70 films, and is as gloriously skilled in documentary as he is in fiction. Director of Exhibitions Jaap Guldemond previews the upcoming exhibition of Herzog’s work at the Eye Filmmuseum, the Netherlands’ home for cinema.

The very purpose of Anu Czerwiński’s feature project is highly particular, yet poignant. A successful performer on stage and on television, he may be one of the first Polish transgender people to ‘come out,’ but somehow his family don’t know that. As far as they are concerned, they have a daughter named Annie. In order to break the silence, Anu determines to go public in his doc and shatter the ‘system of silence that has always organised life in his home.’     

Ukrainian director Olga Stuga made an impassioned plea for her new project, which tells how families are split by the terrible decisions they are forced to make as a result of the war, whether to stay and be part of the struggle or leave and seek safety (and offer support to others) beyond Ukrainian borders. “My husband has been waiting for me in France for a year. I must decide to come back to him and live the life we had, or stay in Ukraine and continue being a voice that tells our Ukrainian stories.”

The Rome-based event is open for submissions for its next edition, running October 9-13 2023. The deadline for application is July 7 2023. MIA’s Doc Co-Production Market is an event committed to providing exposure to documentary projects in development. The international selection committee selects up to 15 projects with high artistic standing and distribution potential.

Dutch Jessica Gorter’s new film tells the story of Yuri Dmitriev, a man who has dedicated his life to identifying and naming the tens of thousands who perished during the Great Terror under Stalin. “When I was in the middle of editing The Red Soul I got the phone call saying that he was arrested,” Gorter says. “I guess that was the moment when I really decided, ‘okay, so I need to make this film. I need to know where this is going.’”

Polish director Mikael Lypinski talks to Business Doc Europe about his new film Unpaved, sold by Sideways Film and world-premiering in Krakow, in which he once again profiles a community of US folk living in the margins of society, this time within a forest sanctuary in Oregon.