Presented by:
Anthology Film Archives
Pacific Film Archives
Mill Valley Film Festival
Cleveland Cinematheque
Vancouver Cinematheque
RealArt Ways
Austin Film Society
Seattle Polish Film Festival
NorthWest Film Forum
Gene Siskel Film Center
The Polish Film Insitute
Polish Archives-Audiovisual Institute
Polish Filmmakers Association
And The Polish Cultural Institute New York
Sunday, October 1, 2017 – Wednesday, February 28, 2018
PROGRAM:
Mill Valley Film Festival – October 7-9th, 2017
Cleveland Cinematheque – October 22nd, 2017
Austin Film Society – October 26th, 2017
NorthWest Film Forum in Seattle – October 29th, 2017
Vancouver Cinematheque – November 22nd, 2017
Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley – December 3-20, 2017
Anthology Film Archives in New York – December 8-10, 2017
The full program at Anthology Film Archives will be shown on rare 35mm prints and was guest curated by Adriana Prodeus.
RealArt Ways in Hartford – December 10, 2017
Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago – TBA
San Rafael, CA; Cleveland, OH; Austin, TX; Seattle, WA; Vancouver, Canada; Berkeley, CA; NYC; Chicago, IL; Harford, CT
The Polish Cultural Institute New York, the Polish Film Institute and Polish Archives-Audiovisual Institute (FINA) join forces to present a celebration of the 70th anniversary of Polish animation. This comprehensive program is a survey of Poland’s finest hand-drawn and computer animation from the past seventy years. Polish animated filmmakers have drawn on their homeland’s rich tradition of graphic art, avant-garde theater, and puppetry to create some of the most technically sophisticated, darkly satiric, and fantastical animation in the world, including such gems as Labirynth by Jan Lenica, The Journey by Daniel Szczechura, Tango by Zbigniew Rybczynski (winner of the Best Short Animated Film Oscar in 1982), and also works by younger artists, such as Pussy by Renata Gasiorowska, Impossible Figures And Other Stories by Marta Pajek, Ziegenort by Tomasz Popakul, and Baths by Tomek Ducki.
The inspiration for this program was the 3 DVD anthology Polish Cinema: Animation commemorating the 70th anniversary of Polish animation and issued by the Polish Film Institute.
The touring version of Polish Cinema: Animation will present 48 short films, representing seventy years of creative and subversive animation, avant-garde, and experimental filmmaking – work that has consistently achieved a synthesis of visual art and the moving image and which is now at the forefront of new media. The series reveals a wide range of animation forms and techniques, whether in Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk’s surrealist visions of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Witold Giersz’s vibrant calligraphies of oil-based paint from the 1960s, Jerzy Kucia‘s jarring juxtapositions of sound and image in the 1970s, or Piotr Dumala‘s groundbreaking plaster-plate innovations of the 1980s and 1990s. It also achieves an extraordinary integration of the visual image and the best in contemporary music, both classical and jazz, with scores by such distinguished composers as Krzysztof Penderecki, Krzysztof Komeda, and Zygmunt Konieczny.
Additionally, the 40th Mill Valley Film Festivalwill feature a retrospective of films by one of Poland’s most treasured animators, Mariusz Wilczynski. Wilczynski will perform live animation accompanied by live music by Trance Mission, a band from San Francisco.
Special thanks to: Magdalena Sroka; Katarzyna Mazurkiewicz; Maria Gradowska (Polish Film Institute); Anna Sienkiewicz-Rogowska, Kamila Bilman (Polish Archives-Audiovisual Institute); Anna Sierakowska (Polish Filmmakers Association); Adrianna Prodeus; Janis Plotkin (Mill Valley Film Festival); Lars Nielsen (Austin Film Society); Joanna Gutt-Lehr (Austin Polish Film Festival); Jim Sinclair (Vancouver Cinematheque); Courtney Sheehan (NorthWest Film Forum); Michal Pietrzyk (Seattle Polish Film Festival); John Ewing (Cleveland Cinematheque); John Morrison (Real Art Ways); Susan Oxtoby, Kathy Geritz (Pacific Film Archives); Barbara Scharres (Gene Siskel Film Center); Jed Rapfogel (Anthology Film Archives)
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