The festival will open with the Polish/Slovak film The Wind. A Documentary Thriller directed by Michał Bielawski which observes how a destructive wind blows trough Podhale and disrupts the life of its inhabitants, influences the wellbeing of animals and leaves lasting wounds in the nature. The second Polish film Of Animals and Men directed by Łukasz Czajka is a dramatic story with archive materials, about a married couple who hid over 300 escapees from the Jewish ghetto in the Warsaw Zoo. They gave them shelter until the break of the Warsaw Uprising, when the house of wild animals stopped being an asylum to the debased Jewish human wrecks. A total of 16 films have been selected for the documentary competition.
"Several of the competition documentaries are sure to complicate the viewer's image of the world. Their subjects are the walls that we put up in our own heads, the life that we live in the shadows of gone wars and the resurrected ghosts of our past - sometimes scary, sometimes grotesquely funny. In our competition we’ve found a place both for the films of masters as well as works of debutants, the observation of reality and creative documentaries, as well as a completely new genre of documentary," said Anita Piotrowska, the Festival's selector.
The Krakow Film Festival is the only festival in Poland qualifying for the Oscar Academy Award in the category of full-length documentaries. It is also among the festivals recommending full-length documentary films for the European Film Awards. The festival is accredited by the FIAPF and the EFFE Label.
The documentary competition films are:
Advocate / Adwokatka (Israel, Canada, Switzerland)
Directed by Rachel Leah Jones, Philippe Bellaiche
Heat Singers / Chór ciepłowników (Ukraine)
Directed by Nadia Parfan
The Fourth Kingdom / Czwarte królestwo (Spain, USA, Mexico)
Directed by Àlex Lora Cercós, Adan Aliaga
A House for You / Dom dla ciebie (Iran)
Directed by Mahdi Bakhshi Moqadam
The Border Fence / Granica (Austria)
Directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter
Kabul, City in the Wind / Kabul, miasto na wietrze (Holland, Afghanistan, Germany, Japan)
Directed by Aboozar Amini
Pariah Dog / Miasto psów (USA)
Directed by Jesse Alk
Memory Is Our Homeland / Naszą ojczyzną jest pamięć (Canada)
Directed by Jonathan Kolodziej Durand
Of Animals and Men / O zwierzętach i ludziach (Poland)
Directed by Łukasz Czajka
Around the Bed of a Dying Collaborator / Przy łóżku kolaboranta (Israel)
Directed by David Ofek, Tal Michael
Mussolini's Sister / Siostra Mussoliniego (Israel)
Directed by Juna Sulieman
Cerro Quemado / Spalone wzgórze (Argentina)
Directed by Juan Pablo Ruiz
Stress / Stres (Germany, USA)
Directed by Florian Baron
But Now Is Perfect / Teraz jest świetnie (Holland)
Directed by Carin Goeijers
The Wind. A Documentary Thriller / Wiatr. Thriller dokumentalny (Poland, Slovakia)
Directed by Michał Bielawski
Wongar / Wongar (Serbia)
Directed by Andrijana Stojković
