POLISH DOCUMENTARY FILMS AT THE FLAHERTIANA

This year, at the Russian festival Flahertiana, a review of Polish documentary films for children and teenagers is held. In the competition, however, the film "In Touch" by Paweł Ziemilski will be shown.

During this edition of the Flahertiana festival, a special new programme of the latest documentary films by the POLISH DOCS addressed to children and teenagers, will be presented. The protagonists of the films selected for the programme overcome their first failures, create their own world, and also learn to live in the adult world.

The programme consists of five Polish documentary films. For the first time in Russia, the film "One Two Zero" by Anna Pawluczuk will be shown. It tells the story of a girl who started training younger gymnasts when she was 9 years old. The director of the film will come to Perm in person in order to meet the audience. The protagonist of "Volte" by Monika Kotecka and Karolina Poryzała struggles with a similar problem. Zuzia is one of the best athletes in the team. Because of her youth and physique, she is lifted by the older, stronger team-mates - "the lower ones." She is the "upper one" - the crown of the acrobatic pyramid.  A new, intensive season begins. During the training sessions, it turns out that Zuzia lost her flexibility.

The moment when everything seems possible was captured by Grzegorz Zariczny in the film "The Last Lesson," which is an observation of high school students preparing for the Matura exam - their final test. After the screening, the director will participate in the Q&A meeting. However, Eri Mizutani in the documentary film "Their Voices" invites the viewers to the mysterious world, carefully hidden by the walls of a boarding school in Wroclaw. In the film, the director transcends difficult communication barriers between the world of adults and children and between the world of the hearing and the hearing-impaired.

The protagonist of the last film from the screening, "Urban Cowboys" by Paweł Ziemilski, is an orphaned 14-year-old Dylan, brought up by his grandparents.  The boy lives in Dublin, in the so-called bad neighbourhood, Clondalkin, infamous for its culture of "urban cowboys," that is, teenagers who illegally breed wild horses.

In Russia, you can watch yet another film by Paweł Ziemilski. His documentary film "In Touch" about the village of Stare Juchy, from which half of the inhabitants left for Iceland to work, is invited to the international competition.

Polish documentary cinema was a frequent guest at the Flahertiana festival, among others, in 2015, the films from the Krakow Film Festival and the short documentary films in the Polish Docs programme were presented there, and in 2017, the retrospective of the films by Maciej Drygas was held.

The co-organiser of the film screenings in the review "POLISH DOCS CHILDREN FILMS PROGRAM" is the Krakow Film Foundation within the frames of the project Polish Docs, and the visit by the Polish directors is organised with the support of the Polish Cultural Institute in Moscow.

You can find more information about the screenings on the website of the Flahertiana.