Krakow 2023

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.

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 artist Agata di Masternak channels her crippling illness into creativity as a way of understanding how other people have coped with their own physical traumas. Małgorzata Kozera’s intriguing film Faces of Agata astutely examines di Masternak’s masterful balancing of art and pain, with the artist herself an engaging narrator of her own challenging life story.

A disturbing and brutal delve into the dark and violent underbelly of military conscription in Belarus as seen from the perspective of the country’s much put-upon youth, Motherland offers a striking – and deeply prescient – analysis of a system of bullying and abuse borrowed from neighbouring Russia, and how it is reflected in the country itself.

“We are looking for films that address the world's most relevant issues, but also reach back into history if they can have a message that is relevant to today,” Kraków FF director Krzysztof Gierat tells BDE ahead of the 63rd edition of the festival running 28 May to 4 June in Kraków, and across Poland on the KFF VOD online streaming platform between 2 and 18 June.

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.’     

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).