The Toronto International Film Festival, one of the biggest film festivals in North America, is a non-competitive event which leads the world in creative and cultural discovery through the moving image
The 38th edition of TIFF presents 40 premiere screenings. This year's festival opens with Bill Condon's dramatization of the rise and fall of Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assang, The Fifth Estate, with the gala presentation showing August: Osage County with Meryl Streep, Sam Shepard, Julia Roberts and Juliette Lewis, and an adaptation of Nelson Mandela’s autobiography in Justin Chadwick's Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. The Polish contribution to the rich repertoire are two features and an HBO docudrama showcased as festival "special presentations". In a decisive move towards European history, the films shed light on the Solidarity movement and its most important leader, secrets from the times of Nazi occupation and the Czech fight against the communist regime.
The last of Wajda's Men
The legendary Polish director's newest film is a film that requires no introduction. One of Poland's most anticipated premiers in 2013, Wałęsa. Man of Hope has its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival (August 28th - September 7th).
Finely balancing between historical narrative and an intimate portrait of its subject, Lech Wałęsa, the film traces the evolution of the man who went from being an electrician to trade-union leader, president and national hero and shows the fate of his wife and children. The film culminates Andrzej Wajda's trilogy comprising Man of Marble (1977), the story of an exemplary worker of the Stalinist period in socialist Poland, which shows the tragedy of the people who believed in the sense of communist changes and ended up being destroyed by the system, and Man of Iron (1981), a movie vibrant with contemporary Polish life.
Holland's Big Budget
Considered one of the Polish director's great accomplishments, the HBO-produced three-part miniseries Burning Bush is about the factual story of Jan Palach, a Czech student who sacrificed his life in Prague in January 1969 in the fight against the communist regime. His politically motivated act was discredited by the communist regime and led his family to hire a lawyer to represent them in a trial against the government. Agnieszka Holland’s protagonist is the young lawyer Dagmar Burešová.
Burning Bush is an HBO Europe production, the channel’s "most ambitious, big-budget project to date", in the words of WorldScreen. "There are few stories in which the contemporary viewer can see himself", Holland says. "I wanted to show young viewers what it looked like back then, that those were the heroes choices – between lesser and greater evil. The fact that HBO decided to go with these kinds of productions and is fighting for them to have their own identity is incredibly worthy."
Pawlikowski's Return to Poland
Returning to Poland after years of directing in the U.K. and France as "one of Britain's leading filmmakers", as the BBC called him, Polish-born Pawel Pawlikowski is most known for Last Resort and the BAFTA-winning My Summer of Love. Ida tells the story of a Polish nun in 1960s Poland who discovers her Jewish origins which had been concealed to save her from the Holocaust. She continues the search into her past and dark family secrets dating from the terrible years of the German occupation unravel. In an interview with Stopklatka, the co-writer of the script says,
A lot of things will come as a surprise to the viewer. This is not an easy, simple film that would seek to set accounts with the past. Nor was it made to fit any particular vision of the past. What I am sure of is that it will touch on important topics.
The Toronto International Film festival offers screenings, lectures, discussions, festivals, workshops, industry support and the chance to meet filmmakers from Canada and around the world. The two Polish films presented at the 2012 TIFF were Katarzyna Rosłaniec's Baby Blues - a take on unresolved childhood issues in a film in which a teenager gets pregnant to avoid being lonely - and Andrzej Jakimowski's Imagine, about the world of the blind, who are able to see more with their imagination than most people with their eyes.
For more information see the TIFF website.
Author: BS, translated and edited by MJ 29.07.2013