Krakow 21

For two years Polish doccer Zofia Pręgowska has been following Trotsky and Natalia, a couple desperately in love but fundamentally at odds. He is a dreamer and a non-conformist. She is a practical home builder. He wants to go abroad to street busk. She wants to get a loan and buy a house. Can their love survive their differences?

In her directorial debut, Polish filmmaker Aga Borzym will delve into the world of adolescence, with all its ups and downs, as experienced by 11‐year‐old Jagoda and 13‐year‐old Zuzia. “We will observe their family, their peers, and above all their very close circle of friends, including boys, and we will get the key to their very fascinating world.”

After an eight-hour phone conversation, Russian filmmaker Julia Sergina and the charismatic, outspoken, ranting and highly unusual taxi driver Viktor decided to work together on a doc. The resulting film screens in Krakow Documentary Competition. The director flags down BDE to explain more.

A delightful and gently profound meditation on the deep-rooted relationship between nature and humanity, Zuzanna Solakiewicz’s beautiful and gentle film resonates with sound, music, voices and history.

To call Walk With Angels a tough documentary to make is somewhat of an understatement. During shooting in the townships surrounding Johannesburg, Polish director Tomasz Wysokiński had a shotgun pointed in his face and saw someone murdered in front of him. He tells all to BDE.

Norwegian Magnus Skatvold gets to grips with legendary New York cop Bob Leuci who exposed corruption in the NYPD in the 1970s, inspiring filmmakers such as Sidney Lumet. But the man Skatvold came to know wasn’t the hard-boiled and divisive whistleblower, rather a genial grandfather in his 1970s. Skatvold explains all to BDE.

A powerful and compelling doc that plays like a drama feature at times, No Hero At All is a striking real-life story of a young disabled Polish man with a petty criminal past who is also a promising alpine skier potentially good enough to make the Paralympics.

Memories both welcome and traumatic are at the moving and involving heart of a film that charts the emotional return of Roman Polański and Ryszard Horowitz to the streets of Krakow that they knew so well as children.

Doc Lab Poland, the documentary component of KFF Industry, kicks off June 2 as local doccers pitch their projects (in post-production) during the Docs to Go! programme. The following day the Docs to Start session! sees the pitch of a dozen brand new Polish projects. KFF Head of Industry Katarzyna Wilk discusses her professional event with Business Doc Europe.

The hybrid 61st Krakow FF kicks off May 30, running 8 days through June 6 and presenting 170 films across 3 competition and 12 non-competition sections. Festival director Krzysztof Gierat guides BDE through a film programme which emphasises the “protagonists' determination in their search for the truth and their fight against adversity.”