Phonic FM | Kinoteka Film Festival

Kinoteka Film Festival

Exeter Polish Film Festival 2010

Exeter is hosting a Polish film festival from March to May under the title Kinoteka, with events across various venues in the city. There seem to be some real delights on offer here, with films spanning several genres and styles.

It opens with a free screening up at the University of the documentary The Runaway, the remarkable story of an escape from Auschwitz, as told by the last surviving participant. The director Marek Pawlowski and producer Malgorzarta Walczak will both be present to discuss the film afterwards.

On 18th March not only fans of motion pictures will be satisfied, when a joint event of Polish Film Festival and Vibraphonic Festival will see two classic movies by Polanski, featuring the unforgettable music by Krzysztof Komeda, one of the founding fathers of European Jazz. Introduction by Prof. Stephen Neale of University of Exeter will shed light on the creator of ‘The Pianist’, the (in)famous son of Polish cinema, Roman Polanski, and his movies.

There is a programme of animation exploring the dark and sinister worlds of the fantastic, with the kind of sepulchral atmosphere with which fairy tales seem to be wreathed in Eastern Europe. Tomek Baginski’s Cathedral looks beautiful in a grotesque HR Giger fashion, and Piotr Dumala captures the spirit of Kafka and Dostoevsky in his black and white and sepia worlds. The latter’s work looks like it might be somewhat reminiscent of Alexander Alexeieff’s animated interludes in Orson Welles film of The Trial, and his Freedom of the Leg has the feel of some of Odilon Redon’s charcoal works and lithographs (which always seem ripe for animation). There’s also a thematic resonance with Jan Svankmajer’s plasticene animation Dark/Lightness/Dark, in which limbs and body parts also take on a life of their own.