Kieślowski and co: Play Poland 2016 Preview

2016 has been dubbed the year of Krzysztof Kieślowski, being that it's 20 years since the great Polish filmmaker’s death. Tributes and retrospectives have appeared around the world, at multiple festivals, and it is Kieślowski's 1981 film Blind Chance that will open the sixth edition of the UK's Play Poland Film Festival on 20 Oct at Filmhouse, Edinburgh. It’s a fitting choice that not only begins the festival with a bang, but nicely complements a few of the contemporary titles that will screen as part of the season confronting ghosts of Poland’s recent history and life under communist rule.

Blind Chance’s most striking component is its split narrative following a med-school dropout (Bogusław Linda) whose fate is played out three times based on the result of a race to catch a train to Warsaw (Kieślowski's delicious premise was pilfered wholesale for British rom-com Sliding Doors.) Through these alternate timelines, Kieślowski explored the ways that a veritable everyman can find themselves on staunchly opposed sides of the political divide, life shaped to unrecognisable ends by subtle events.

In Marcin Koszalka’s The Red Spider (1 Nov, Filmhouse), the audience is put in the similar – and unusual – position of watching the emergence of a serial killer and pondering what it is that has shaped him. Erstwhile documentarian Koszalka blends fact and fiction in this unconventional crime thriller that tells the tale of two serial killers in 1960s Krakow, where the narrative's spiky ambiguity is enhanced by the communist-era's all pervading paranoia.

The reasons for that paranoia rear their head again in Ryszard Bugajski’s Blindness (10 Nov, Filmhouse), which sees Julia Brystiger (Maria Mamona) subject to surveillance and abuse at the hands of state officials, somewhat ironically given her previous life, shown via flashbacks, as a brutal state enforcer. It vaguely recalls Wojciech Marczewski’s Shivers in its examination of communist ideals, Stalinist personality cult and Catholicism – though its primary focus is the internal psychology and anguish of Brystiger, haunted by the deeds of her past.

The past haunts far more literally in Marcin Wrona’s Demon (8 Nov, Filmhouse). A strange blend of supernatural thriller and deadpan wedding comedy, it transplants the Jewish legend of the dybbuk into the centre of a young couple’s nuptials to dig into intimate questions around how well you can truly know the person you’re marrying and more expansive ones regarding Poland’s Jewish population and the Holocaust.

Beautifully shot by Pawel Flis, it manages to be stark and creepy in its straight handling of the possession of the young groom, Piotr (Italy Tiran), by the dybbuk. Elsewhere his new father-in-law schemes to get the guests so drunk that they won’t notice or judge Piotr's increasingly bizarre behaviour and the deteriorating wedding can’t help but acquire shades of Andrzej Wajda’s The Wedding and Krzysztof Zanussi’s The Contract.

Alongside the feature films are further treats in the form of shorts and an exhibition of stunning Polish film posters. As with film culture from any part of the world, shorts provide a glimpse not only into the future of Polish cinema but also out to the very edge. The shorts on display in the several programmes at Play Poland are both calling card works from filmmakers who may be at the festival with feature films in years to come, and the work of those pushing at boundaries of style and structure that is almost impossible in the longer form. This bumper crop includes work from the Silesia Film School, the Wajda Studio, the Lodz Film School, the Munk Studio, the O!pla animation festival and a selection of classic animations courtesy of the National Film Archive.

From features, to shorts, to a single image. Anyone familiar with the incredible legacy of film posters in Poland would do well to remember the name Waldemar Świerzy, who is the subject of a major exhibition at the festival. He was the co-founder of the Polish School of Posters and is considered by many to be the greatest film poster designer, which is saying a lot given the exalted company he keeps. These posters were an artistic outlet in Communist-era Poland and Świerzy and his contemporaries went all out in their local re-imaginings of Western films, most famously Midnight Cowboy, Apocalypse Now, Sunset Blvd. and Blow-Up.