Poland to hold first British film festival

Poland’s first ever British film festival will be held this year in the western city of Poznań, in what the organisers hope will become an annual showcase of UK culture.

The five-day event, which will take place 13-17 November, will include an Alfred Hitchcock retrospective, a section showcasing classics of British cinema, and advance screenings of films ahead of their Polish premieres.

The festival will also celebrate the cultures of the nations that make up the UK – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – while also interrogating the social, colonial and post-colonial contexts in which British filmmaking has taken place.

The first edition of the British Film Festival will take place under the slogan “United Kingdom of Cinema”. It is organised by the city of Poznań, local cinema Kino Muza and Estrada Poznańska, a cultural institution. The British Council is also a partner in the event.

“Although this is only the first edition, we see great potential in this idea, stemming not only from the huge existing body of British film culture, but also from its very interesting development in recent years,” said Dorota Reksińska, the creator of the festival.

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The full programme will be published in October. So far, two retrospectives have been announced. The first will show selected works from the filmography of Alfred Hitchcock – the hugely influential director known as “the master of suspense” – to mark the 125th anniversary of his birth.

Among the planned screenings – which include the director’s earlier UK productions as well as his career-defining work in Hollywood – is his 1927 silent film The Lodger, which will be accompanied by live music.

The Birds will be screened as a pop-up cinema event in a special venue, “surrounded by candlelight and…church architecture”. Other screenings will include the thrillers Psycho, Dial M for Murder and North by Northwest.

The second retrospective will showcase the work of award-winning Scottish director, Lynne Ramsay. Her short films and early-career features will be shown alongside her better-known films, We Need to Talk About Kevin and You Were Never Really Here.

The festival will also include a number of themed sections. “First Things First” will present a variety of films screening for the first time in Poland. Meanwhile “Classics” will feature iconic works of British cinema, such as Trainspotting.

“Mind the Gap” – whose name alludes to the famous announcement on the London Underground as well as the class gap in British society – will present films from the social realist tradition, including an early Daniel Day-Lewis role in My Beautiful Laundrette and Tim Roth’s debut in Made in Britain.

“Five O’Clock” will showcase period dramas that foreground the traditions of the landed gentry and aristocracy, as well as the history of the British Empire. This section’s name refers to drinking tea at five in the afternoon, which some consider a British tradition.

 

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British B-movies – low-budget, commercial genre films – will be screened from VHS tapes in the late-night “Bloody Hell!” section.

The event will also incorporate various phenomena from British popular culture, including tea drinking at 5 p.m, a red telephone booth and a double-decker bus.

It’s a festival where you can “read Jane Austen’s prose in [your] spare time…sing songs from Monty Python or those composed by The Beatles,” said Reksińska. “There will also be famous characters: Paddington Bear, Harry Potter, Mr Bean and James Bond.”

“We think of the festival as a flagship event in Poznań and one that has great prospects of developing with new contexts, film competitions and new partnerships in the years to come,” explained Reksińska.

Main image credit: British Film Festival/Facebook

Agata Pyka

Agata Pyka is an assistant editor at Notes from Poland. She is a journalist and a political communication student at the University of Amsterdam. She specialises in Polish and European politics as well as investigative journalism and has previously written for Euractiv and The European Correspondent.