Founder and the director of the festival is Jan A.P. Kaczmarek, composer and Oscar Winner.
On Friday 13 July the film Our Struggles (Nos batailles, dir. Guillaume Senez) will open the Transatlantyk Festival and receive its Polish premiere. Senez's film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in the Semaine de la Critique section. It tells the story of Olivier, who has to transform from a full-time employee to a full-time househusband taking care of two small children, after his partner leaves him. In this moving but reassuring drama, Romain Duris, playing the lead role, proves once again that he thrives in any film genre. Two more Opening films that will be screened on 13 July: Donbass (dir. Sergey Loznitsa) and The Harvesters (Die Stropers, dir. by Etienne Kallos). They will both have their Polish premieres at Transatlantyk.
NEW CINEMA
The film Our Struggles is one of over 40 film, to be presented in the New Cinema section of Transatlantyk Festival. The section is an overview of the world cinema and includes films awarded at international film festivals: Venice, Berlin, SXSW, Sundance, Karlovy Vary or Cannes. All of the films in this section are Polish premieres and will compete for the special Transatlantyk Distribution Award. The prize of over 10 thousand Euro will be used to support the distribution of the winning film in Polish cinemas. The festival audience will select the winner.
In the New Cinema section, there will be screened Donbass directed by Sergey Loznitsa. In his latest film (the winner of the Un Certain Regard Award for Best Director at Cannes), Loznitsa takes us on a journey through the successive circles of the hell of the war in East Ukraine. Loznitsa has made a thoroughly modern film, referring to the fragmented ways in which we perceive the world today. As such, Donbass is a story about contemporary humanity and civilization in the era of post-truth and fake-news. Sergey Loznitsa will be a guest at this year's festival. Another Transatlantyk premiere is the international and Polish co-production The Harvesters (Die Stropers, dir. Etienne Kallos), a story of two boys, Janno and Pieter, who compete for power, heritage and parental love. The background for their story is the Republic of South Africa and the community of white Afrikaans. The film had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, in the Un Certain Regard section.
At Transatlantyk Festival, there will be also presented The Miseducation of Cameron Post (dir. Desiree Akhavan), which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival or Daughter of Mine (Figlia mia, dir. Laura Bispuri) with the charismatic Alba Rohrwacher. Laura Bispuri has been acclaimed as the hope of Italian cinema, and the film reveals the talent of the director, so beautifully portraying various shades of femininity. Other titles presented in the Competition include among others:
Different Kinds of Rain, reż. Isabel Prahl;
3 days in Quiberon, reż. Emily Atef;
Amateurs, reż. Gabriela Pichler;
No Date, No Signature, reż. Vahid Jalilvand;
Dark Wind, reż. Nila Madhab Panda;
Gutland, reż. Govinda Van Maele;
Last Child, reż. Shin Dong-seok;
Scary Mother, reż. Ana Urushadze;
Horizon, reż. Tinatin Kajrishvili;
Winter Flies, reż. Olmo Omerzu;
Journey's End, reż. Saul Dibb;
A Letter to the President, reż. Roya Sadat;
Loveling / Benzinho, reż. Gustavo Pizzi;
The Wandering Soap Opera, reż. Raúl Ruiz, Valeria Sarmiento;
Behold My Heart, reż. Joshua Leonard,
Sicario: Day of the Soldado, reż. Stefano Sollima;
Sofia, reż. Meryem Benm’Barek-Aloïsi,
Swinging Safari, reż. Stephan Elliott;
Theatre of War, reż. Lola Arias;
Via Carpatia, reż. Klara Kochańska, Kasper Bajon;
Blockage, reż. Mohsen Gharaie;
This year, 31 films qualified for the finals of the Polish Short Films Competition. The short films will be assessed by the international Jury composed of: Dorota Kedzierzawska (director and screenwriter of such films as Time to Die, Crows and Nothing), Annette Insdorf (a film critic, professor of the film department of Columbia University, the author of books on the work of Krzysztof Kieślowski and Wojciech Jerzy Has, to name but two) and Ariel Schweitzer (a film critic, the editor of Cahiers du cinéma). The winner will receive the Golden Ark Award for the best short film and the cash prize of 10,000 Polish Zloty.
Films made with VR (Virtual Reality) technology for the first time, this year will have the format of a competition; the jury will select the winner of the Transatlantyk VR SpaceTime Award 2018. The presentation of VR films at Transatlantyk is one of the largest virtual reality film events in Europe. The five-day screening of such a wide and diverse repertoire is still a pioneering project in this part of the world. The films will be shown in thematic sets, selected from the best cinematic VR experiences in the world, each set being centered around different topics and genres, including science-fiction and music videos created with VR technology.
FIPRESCI PLATINUM AWARD – SALLY POTTER
The special guest of the festival will be Sally Potter. During Transatlantyk Festival, Sally Potter will be presented with the prestigious award FIPRESCI Platinum 93 of International Film Critics Federation. The ceremony will take place on 14 July.
The ‘FIPRESCI 90+’ Award, which was first handed out to several outstanding directors on the 90th anniversary of the federation, is to be granted every year till the hundredth anniversary of FIPRESCI, emphasizing the role and importance of film critics. Founded in 1925, FIPRESCI is currently the most significant and prestigious organization associating film critics from all around the world.
Transatlantyk Festival is one of the very few festivals worldwide at which FIPRESCI awards, celebrating the 90th anniversary of the federation, are handed out. The award ceremony will be preceded by a masterclass on the director's cinema, during which the filmmaker will answer questions from the audience and share her methods of creative work. In the Close-up section, Sally Potter’s films Orlando, Ginger & Rosa, Yes, The Tango Lesson and The Party can be viewed.
CLOSE-UPS: ANDRZEJ BARAŃSKI, LUCIAN PINTILIE, MILOŠ FORMAN
One of the most important components of this year's program will be the Andrzej Baranski retrospective. His exquisite, modest and poetic films deal with one of the most important issues of contemporary mobility: the question of home and homeland, the place that shapes one’s character and fosters value, the place worth fighting for and which always remains a point of reference. Andrzej Barański, his closest collaborators and actors who appeared in the director's films (including Jan Frycz, Artur Barciś, Ewa Dałkowska and Marek Bukowski) will be guests at the festival.
Another of this year's retrospectives will be the overview of films by the outstanding Romanian artist Lucian Pintilie. The recently deceased director was named the godfather of the Romanian New Wave, and his films have become classics of Romanian cinema. As part of the retrospective, the audience of the 8th Transatlantyk Festival will discover the most important works by the director. George Mihaita (from The Reconstruction), Razvan Vasilescu (who played the role of Mitici in the The Oak) and Andrei Sandrea, a Romanian film critic, will be guests at the festival.
Another Close-up will be focused on the work of Miloš Forman. The vitally important theme of the films by the Czech director, deceased in April this year, was freedom, one of the motifs of this year's Transatlantyk. As part of the section we will show classic films such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
As part of the Cinema Stories section, Transatlantyk takes its audience on a journey through the history of motion pictures. ‘There are so many brilliant films in the history of cinema. The moment when we are overwhelmed with wonder is always the thing I am waiting for. Our Cinema Stories section is there to share these kinds of unique experiences with the audience’, says Joanna Łapińska, the program director of the festival. This year's section of Cinema Stories is about what freedom means in the individual and intimate dimension and in the right to live on one’s own terms or in harmony with one's ‘self’. The program includes The Conformist (Il conformista, dir. Bernardo Bertolucci), the Oscar nominee for Best Screenplay, the masterpiece of European cinema with legendary acting and spectacular cinematography by Vittorio Storaro; Turkish Delight, directed by Paul Verhoeven, the biggest hit in the history of Dutch cinema, a film-injection of counter-cultural energy, which remains as bold and unconventional as it seemed 45 years ago. In this section there will also be shown Yellow Submarine, directed by George Dunning, an exceptional animation based on the music of The Beatles. The screening is planned for exactly 50 years after the film's premiere on 17 July 1968 in Great Britain.
For the eighth time Transatlantyk Culinary Cinema will take place. As part of the Culinary Cinema section, which is especially appreciated by the audience, excellent culinary and cuisine-related films will be shown; pictures devoted to food, but also personal, and therefore, fascinating stories of great stars from the world of cooking. Culinary Cinema is organised in co-operation with Berlinale Kulinariche Kino. The program of the section has been supervised by Thomas Struck, the creator and curator of this section at Berlinale for 8 years. In this year's Culinary Cinema, we will watch the following films: Eat Drink Man Woman, dir. Ang Lee, dinner by Wojciech Modest Amaro, The Quest of Alain Ducasse, dir. Gilles de Maistre, dinner by Kurt Scheller and Robert Skubisz, Cuban Food Stories, dir. Asori Soto, dinner by Robert Sowa, In Search of Israeli Cuisine, dir. Roger Sherman, dinner by Marcin Popielarz, Our Blood is Wine, dir. Emily Railsback, dinner by Justyna Słupska Kartaczowska.
Several dozen canopied beds in which which great films are shown; VOX Cinema in Bed is one of the favorite places of the Transatlantyk audience. The American magazine BuzzFeed recognized Transatlantyk Cinema in Bed as one of the top 10 outdoor cinemas in the world. As part of this section, we will show, among other films I Got Life! (dir. Blandine Lenoir), which won the main prize at last year's festival, the Transatlantyk Distribution Award, Panic Attack (dir. Paweł Maślona), Wild Roses (dir. Anna Jadowska), Lady Macbeth, dir. William Oldroyd), Pulp Fiction (dir. Quentin Tarantino) and Sicario (dir. Denis Villeneuve). The last film’s sequel, Sicario: Day of the Soldado, will receive its Polish premiere at this year's Transatlantyk.
TRANSATLANTYK INSTANT COMPOSITION CONTEST
The globally unique annual competition for young composers, the Transatlantyk Instant Composition Contest ™, is the competition of immediate composition, requiring participants to make quick artistic decisions and demonstrate their improvisation skills. Young musicians have the task of watching a selected film fragment and composing live music. The jury of the competition in recent years has included such outstanding and well-known talents as John Debney, Richard Gladstein, Marco Beltrami, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Jean-Michel Bernard and Jan A.P. Kaczmarek. Winners of this year’s edition will be chosen by an international jury comprising of Mark Ethan, Jan A.P.Kaczmarek, Lukasz L.U.C.Rostowski, Maria Sadowska and Diane Warren!
Industry focused closed film workshops under the name Icebreaker will feature subject A budget without boundries - how to find funding for a film in Europe. The event is co-organised by Creative Europe Desk Polska. The partner is National Chamber of Audivisual Producers and Łódź Film Commission.
more: www.transatlantyk.org
