National vs international in Gdynia
While Paweł Pawlikowski's IDA (2013) has been touring the world for one year and currently tops many early Oscars predictions, it is in Gdynia, on native Polish soil, where the magic happened for the first time last September (eat your hearts out, Telluride reviewers!). In fact, there has been a long tradition of national showcase events in countries behind the Iron Curtain, where a certain man was believed to had said something like “Of all arts, the most important for us is cinema,” so for decades film there was considered art and weapon, by people from both sides of the ideological barricade. Respectively, these events were mass celebration of the new aesthetic heights achieved. In today's political and industry reality, cinema is being consumed quite differently, yet many of these festivals continue to take place, and the Polish titan Gdynia, now looking forward to its 40th anniversary, is one of the most well-know and prestigious among them. Irina Trocan tells us more about it...
Already at its 39th edition, the Gdynia Film Festival has a long tradition behind, and, as far as cultural events go, it is a national celebrity. It is the only exclusively Polish film festival in the country, awarding titles for a variety of merits: beside the Golden Lion for the best film, there are technical prizes for screenplay, music, and editing, as well as early-bird awards for best debut in directing and acting. Briefly put, everyone in Poland keeps their eyes on Gdynia to discover the current year's cream of the crop as well as the filmmakers of tomorrow.
In one respect, the things are settled. The Gdynia fest has large stakes, internally, given that Poland has a running film industry and getting one million viewers to pay for a cinema ticket is at least a yearly occurrence, which is remarkable, for a country of 38 million inhabitants with a Communist past. Poland is also, to an extent, conservative with its cultural patrimony and its local heroes. So much so that it might create a rift between the national market and the international audience. For instance, this year's highly anticipated festival premiere was DELUGE REDIVIVUS / POTOP REDIVIVUS, a restoration and abbreviation of Jerzy Hoffman's 5-hour long 1974 epic, itself an adaptation of Henryk Sienkiewicz' 1886 mandatory-reading novel The Deluge, rich in references to Polish history and nobility – patriotic high notes that will inevitably get lost in translation.
The main problem, as it would appear, is how to take charge of an event of regional importance (and keep it important regionally), so as to make it grow by international standards as well. One objective would be a harsher selection. Its role as national showcase notwithstanding, the Gdynia fest should make sure that all the competition films are, well, competitive. The same applies to the Young Cinema Competition, the festival's ten-hour long short films programme. Given the large number of shorts made every year in Poland, this section still requires careful selection – reportedly, only 25 titles were screened out of the 60 submissions.
The second objective would be more accurate branding – creating an identity for parallel sections and for what they expect to promote. This year's Visions Apart off-competition section consequently replaced the more vaguely dubbed (and omni-embracing) Panorama of last year and was reduced to only a small number of titles. Credit is due to the new Artistic Director, prolific film critic Michał Oleszczyk, whose scope and aesthetic discernment are surely to the benefit of the festival. Along with his declared intention to make the festival more visible on the world map, he also brings to the attention of international guests a selection of Polish classics undergoing restoration or rediscovery: this year's highlights were the lyrical & satyrical MATTHEW'S DAYS / ŻYWOT MATEUSZA (1968) by director Witold Leszczyński and GOTO, ISLAND OF LOVE / GOTO, L'ȊLE D'AMOUR (1969), a French-produced film by director and animator Walerian Borowczyk.
As a foreigner from a not-so-far-away country yet speaking a wholly different language, I found that the Gdynia festival is making efforts to be accommodating, but still remains partly inaccessible. Subtitled screenings and conferences with live English translation were marked in the program, but keeping track of them did require constant vigilance. Though subtitles were available, presumably, for all competition films, watched and awarded by an international jury, not each of their screenings were subtitled – I postponed booking WARSAW 44 / MIASTO 44 (2014) till the last day of the festival, when I confidently entered the cinema and waited for the film to begin, only to discover it was not subtitled. Certain sections of the festival – Pre-War Cinema Treasures and The Archives of Horror – were inaccessible to me for the same reason.
Complications aside, I did manage to catch about half of the films in the Main Competition as well as half of those in the Young Cinema programme. The feature films, mostly by debuting directors, were in overwhelming degree world premieres, running with sold-out screenings in several rooms of the Gdynia multiplex (simultaneously, too!). The exceptions that already had their run in local cinemas can be counted on one hand: THE CITIZEN / OBYWATEL (2014) by well-known actor and director Jerzy Stuhr, JACK STRONG (2014) by Władysław Pasikowski, THE MIGHTY ANGEL / POD MOCNYM ANIOŁEM (2014) by Wojciech Smarzowski, as well as HARDKOR DISKO (2014). A couple more, KEBAB & HOROSCOPE / KEBAB I HOROSKOP (2014) and ONIRICA - FIELD OF DOGS / ONIRICA - PSIE POLE (2014), were presented at other festivals before Gdynia. From a practical point of view, it seems that Gdynia is a good launching platform for new Polish films. As for their content, most of what I have seen is rather modest: generically conventional works like Michał Otłowski's WATERLINE / JEZIORAK (2014) blending with 1970's uneven and unhinged auteur cinema (many of the shorts included in this category), latest-in-tech spectacles (WARSAW 44 by Jan Komasa is assessed to be one of the most expensive Polish productions ever made), and a couple of comedies.
I would like to make a modest digression from my evaluation of the festival and pose a question that might just be vital in this case: given the critical reflex of discussing films and festivals, in terms of how they measure up to a global standard, do we judge unfairly sometimes, because we demand to be addressed in an international idiom? Are global relevance and conformity to current cinema trends prerequisites? Are they negligible, lacking artistic value by themselves? To make the question more specific, I have especially appreciated a film called LITTLE CRUSHES / MALE STLUCZKI / MAŁE STŁUCZKI (2014) by Aleksandra Gowin and Ireneusz Grzyb, a quirky slacker comedy, screening in the Visions Apart section, to be later told that it was made with an international audience in mind, unlike all-around-award-winner GODS / BOGOWIE (2014). Does this mean or at least hint at the idea that I am only sensitive to films produced to cater to my taste? For one thing, it is true that LITTLE CRUSHES is lacking in socioeconomic specificity, which on the one hand makes it understandable within its relatively fresh genre, on the other hand brings up the possibility that it might be more appealing to foreigners than to the people among whom these characters presumably live.
The debate around internationally recognizable tropes is more complicated than it would seem, though. The category of universal films in Gdynia would probably include HARDKOR DISKO by Krzysztof Skonieczny, a film targeting teenagers still stuck in their antisocial phase, which has gained cult status in Poland after being distributed this spring. With a brooding and darkly handsome protagonist who seduces, then loses, and then pursues a manic pixie dreamgirl, it is a finely wrought cinematic device made to keep viewers busy questioning what they are seeing rather than questioning its implications. Adding sensuous delight to a fragmented and causally unclarified series of events, it follows the trail of an arthouse tradition that was once associated with first-person cinema, but it has long since fallen into neat and rigid coding. Again, this is an international film that had modest success in the Gdynia Awards gala (winning Best Director of Photography & Debut Prizes for the director and the actress), but its local impact might be relevant in hinting at a shifting cultural landscape.
As already mentioned, the festival favorite this year was GODS by Łukasz Palkowski, depicting the life and trials of superhuman-pioneer-cardiologist marathon-heart-surgeon Zbigniew Religa. Simultaneously enhancing the aura of the protagonist as he struggles to build a heart surgery clinic from scratch (his enterprise thus perfectly understandable without wandering away from a capitalist mentality) and giving him disparate moments of human weakness (presumingly incandescent to his people, who believe national heroes never break down), the film is both crafty and highly limited. Every few minutes of tension end with a comic relief, every passage that risks getting technical is followed by the knee-jerk pathos of this brilliant medic, being by necessity a careless husband. From an artistic point of view, GODS is null – it never hints at the fact that pioneering research is by definition a trial-and-error process, in which errors can be costly. Seeing that it works, however, with an icon that cannot be reconciled with a normal-life narrative, my objection might be a little like taxing a Clint Eastwood film for lack of realism. Therefore, I will limit my criticism to saying that GODS belongs firmly in the category of strictly national achievements.
By now, I should sum up my impressions of the festival into a solid conclusion, and it is a particularly tricky thing to do so this time. I would rather assume the subjectivity of my evaluation and the slight randomness of my trajectory through the Gdynia fest (which I have attended this year for the first time) and opt to be descriptive of the experience. Spending a week in Gdynia – mostly inside the cinema, watching the latest Polish productions – made me feel a little bit like an underwhelmed critic, a little bit like a venturesome cinephile, a little bit like a tourist.