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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.

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.

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.”

In this fascinating behind-the-scenes examination, world-premiering in Krakow, members of the legendary Workcenter theatre collective founded by Jerzy Grotowski – acclaimed as one of the 20th Century’s most influential theatre practitioners - speak frankly for the first time about their experiences related to the work methods he devised, and which were developed by his apprentice and Artistic Director Thomas Richards.

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.