Elżbieta Kurkowska

There is a writer who in the late 1970s managed to publish a poem in the monthly "Nowy Wyraz". It was enough to become a self-confessed writer whose name began to appear in the state media. The writer takes full advantage of his privileges - he flirts with power, sympathizes with the opposition, and collapses his studies at the same time. He is saved from going to the army by an exalted essayist whose sister is the head of the psychiatric hospital in Tworki. In a psychiatric institution, a writer meets a schizophrenic who writes a novel. After his suicide, the protagonist takes over the draft, which he publishes outside of censorship under his name, thanks to which he gains fame, fame and money. August '80 breaks out....

A morality tale that starts from answering a mysterious passenger's mobile phone left on a train, and intertwines the lives of student Bartek, who leads an immoral life, and several strangers.

Another film from the TV series "Polish Holidays", this time illustrating a holiday not entirely Polish, but already firmly rooted in the native reality - Valentine's Day. The script for it was written by Jerzy Pilch. For the famous writer, winner of the Nike Award, this is the second encounter with this cycle: earlier he wrote the script for the excellent "Yellow Scarf". His collaboration with director Janusz Majewski resulted in a story full of humor and charm, treating love with a slight wink of the eye and a touch of nostalgia. Wojciech Malajkat, who also played the main role, is a great merit.

Jerzy Stuhr wrote, directed, and starred in this drama about a man sworn to uphold the law who applies a very different moral code to himself than he does to others. As Adam Borowski, Stuhr plays a government lawyer prosecuting a variety of cases, including smuggling, theft, child abandonment, and racially motivated assault. However, Adam's own life is hardly a model by which to live. He's overextended himself financially and is trying to figure out how to avoid paying the hospital bills for his terminally ill mother. Adam is married, but he's been having an affair for some time, and, while he breaks off his relationship with his mistress, he's easily tempted into other liaisons. His wife wants to adopt a handicapped child; Adam would prefer not to have another child in the house, and he uses his influence to slow up the paperwork. And in order to reduce his tax bill, Adam has involved himself in a charitable donation scheme of dubious legality.

The film is a biblical soap-opera whose action unfolds in the Californian desert. Karen and Wes's marriage is crumbling apart - like a sandcastle. Karen can't even make love to her husband any more - the sand has managed to get everywhere. Harry, a tax collector, is a witness to this marriage falling apart. As a civil servant he hears Wes confession. However he isn't able to help him. The omnipotent eye of television glitters above the desert - that raw allegory of America where neither the white nor the black have it good. If Samuel Beckett and Joan Collins had a romance, then their child would look like this film.

The main character is Bogna, a thirty year old woman lost in her surrounding reality and unhappy in her private life. After her husband departs for a foreign scholarship, Bogna learns that her mother died. The trip to her hometown for the funeral becomes a voyage in time, during which she relives the memories of her idyllic childhood.

In the cinema "Liberty" there takes place a screening of the film " Daybreak". The screening is interrupted by an unusual event. Actors come to life on the screen, start conversations among themselves, draw the audience into them. Crowds gather around the cinema, the relevant authorities and services wonder what to do in this complicated situation. Also arriving is the censor, a man reaching his fifties, a one-time literary critic and journalist. The line between fiction and reality begins to blur...

Witek runs after a train. Three variations follow on how such a seemingly banal incident could influence the rest of Witek's life.

In the 21st century, prisoners aboard penitentiary space ships explore unknown worlds. Scope, one of the prisoners is sent on a planet though to be lifeless, until he found "Humans" on it.

Set in an underground dungeon inhabited by bundled, ragged human beings, after the nuclear holocaust. The story follows the wanderings of a hero through the situations of survival. People wait for the Ark to arrive and rescue them while their habitat falls apart.

In the 50's a tailor drinking with his friends has an attack that requires an emegency treatment in the hospital. He has damaged kidneys. Given a second lease on life the tailor thinks that while in a coma he has communicated with the distant stars. He gives up tailoring and turns to the stars. He engages his friends in a village to build an observatory. He becomes recognized and for a time being even the authorities back him up. But then comes bitter awakening: his wife can't take his obsessions anymore and leaves him. The town council calls upon him to close his work as the first Sputnik goes into space. Then he is invited to an astronomical convention, He becomes the sensation of the conference, not however, as a amateur astronomer, but by guessing the clothing measurements of the delegates. Back home he realizes that his dream may be over, but he cannot help gazing at the sky. Written by Polish Cinema Database

The protagonist of "Passerby" is writer and filmmaker Tadeusz Konwicki. His story, which reflects the paradoxes of the 20th century history, is commented by means of fragments of his films, documentary newsreels and stage productions.

A young architect is locked up in prison. He recalls his uncompromising youth and gradual sliding into the moral swamp of compromises. He was not alone. A group of his friends, dreamers and glass house builders, accompanied him.

Film opens on December 18, 1999, just a few days before the dawn of the new century. A local reporter, Iron Idem, announces that the Martians have landed. Shortly after that his program loses its independence: he is given the script telling the crowds how to welcome the invaders.

A dramatisation of the workers' protests in June 1976 in Radom, seen from the perspective of the local Secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party. [Produced in 1981, but not commercially released until 1996.]

The film is set in a terrorizing world of the future, where technology commands the movements of individuals, supervised by the doctors, carrying out a program to improve the human race. Thus, instead of doctors creating a monster, the monsters are already there as the species of the future - but one of them is suspected by the doctors of being a human being. That is Golem in reverse.

An officer stationed in a remote Ukranian outpost at the end of the First World War is dying of consumption. Suffering from feverish dreams and hallucinations, he begins to collect religious art and attends seances.

Stefan Starzyński, the mayor of Warsaw, organizes life in the capital in September 1939 and lift the inhabitants' spirits via radio announcements. After the surrender, he does not use his last chance to escape.

Set in the early 1930s, a young man finds a job as a dishwasher in a hotel and quickly works his way up the ladder. Loosely based on the novel by Henryk Worcell.

The heroes of this film are hands and a violin. We won’t see the hero's face, but we’ll notice a special relationship that exists between the musician and the instrument. It resembles real love. The man is able to make the inanimate instrument a living instrument.

A school teacher from a small town in Poland comes to Warsaw to see his estranged wife, a window dresser, in the hope that she will return to him rather than give him a divorce.

A portrait of the inhabitants of Jastrzębie (a mining town in Silesia) – young men and women who came there to begin their adult lives. Jastrzębie received municipal rights in 1963, but it is still a huge construction site. Children slide down the heaps of coal, located between the blocks of flats. Young women, dressed in worker jackets, look for their husbands. The life of the inhabitants is subordinated to communicates released by the council of the mine. Working days are about queues and listening to the radio, and days off are about festivals and performances of the mining band. Boxing in the ring and fights in the streets. The directorial debut of Stanisław Manturzewski, a sociologist, journalist, and documentary filmmaker, made in collaboration with Stanisław Niedbalski, a cameraman.

In 1930s, a doctor has an affair with the wife of a wealthy industrialist in Poland.

An official falls victim to hooligans. He recognizes one of the attackers at a party organized by his director.

This documentary explores the changing faces of the old Polish city of Lodz, and how its modernization, both physically and culturally, affects the older, more conservative residents, many of whom lived through World War II and are confused and somewhat resentful at the changes they're seeing.