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A mysterious stranger arrives in a small town in western Poland soon after the second world war, and embarks on a string of messy, equally enigmatic affairs

This cult 1960 Polish film is a political absurdist nightmare from director Kazimierz Kutz, written for the screen by Józef Hen and featuring a clamorous, disturbing orchestral score by composer Wojciech Kilar (later to win awards for his music for Coppola’s Dracula and Polanski’s The Pianist). It feels like a European new wave picture by Antonioni or Resnais, but has something of the romantic travails of Franz Kafka, and even appears to anticipate the coming vogue for paranoia thrillers.

Like Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds from 1958, but weirder in tone, this is about a man who is part of the Polish anti-communist underground insurgency, who refuses to carry out an order to kill a communist. It was therefore a subject congenial...

Every now and then, a film comes along that transcends its genre, reshaping the cinematic landscape and becoming something of a cultural phenomenon. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws is one such movie.

Released in 1975, this thriller didn’t just win audiences over; it reinvented the concept of the summer blockbuster. But its influence didn’t stop there. Jaws secured a rare spot in the hearts of filmmakers worldwide, including one of the most celebrated animators of all time, Hayao Miyazaki.

A scene from Jaws | Credits: Universal Pictures

From the pulse-pounding score that sticks to your bones to the ever-tightening noose of suspense, Jaws was a cultural earthquake, setting the stage for the blockbuster era that would follow. And then there’s that shark. It didn’t just swim into our screens—it sunk its teeth into the very heart of Hollywood, leaving a legacy that continues to send ripples through the industry.

Francis Ford Coppola reveals a list of 20 movies that he highly recommends you watch and show "appreciation to the pictures that inspired" him. Widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, Coppola has directed movies such as The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now. Over a decade after his last film, the 85-year-old director's latest movie is Megalopolis, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and is already fiercely divisive ahead of its theatrical release on September 27.

Ahead of Megalopolis' theatrical release, Francis Ford Coppola joined Letterboxd and created a list of 20 movies that he highly recommends. While not complete by any means, the list is simply 20 movies that he enjoys, have inspired him, and would recommend to any fan of cinema or aspiring filmmaker. Check out his list below:

French Cancan (1955) The Bad Sleep Well (1960) The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) Shanghai Express...

Megalopolis director Francis Ford Coppola has joined Letterboxd, the social cataloguing service where members can rate and review films and keep track of what they’ve watched. I’m a little addicted. Coppola has shared a list of twenty films that he would recommend to any cinephile or aspiring filmmaker, which you can check out below.

French Cancan (Jean Renoir) The Bad Sleep Well (Akira Kurosawa) The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Frank Capra) Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg) The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey) The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis) The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa) Tokyo Story (Yasujirō Ozu) The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau) The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg) Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan) Punch Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson) Empire of the Sun (Steven Spielberg) Sunrise (F.W. Murnau) Joyless Street (G.W. Pabst) A Place in the Sun (George Stevens) The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese) After...

Scorsese's Letterboxd list reveals his love for cinema, featuring companion movies from a wide range of genres and time periods. The list demonstrates Scorsese's role as a scholar of film, with many obscure choices that show his depth of knowledge. The cinematic elements in Scorsese's latest epic, Killers of the Flower Moon, reflect his passion for classic works and his ability to reimagine them.

Martin Scorsese details which films are the ideal double-features for his movies in his Letterboxd list. The auteur filmmaker directed his first feature movie, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, in 1967. Since then, Scorsese created more copious iconic epics and features, including Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Wolf of Wall Street, and most recently, Killers of the Flower Moon, which is currently in theaters.

Taking to Letterboxd, Scorsese reveals an annotated list of the best companion movies to his work. The list included titles across nearly a century of cinema,...

A lot of articles exist on the internet listing the movies Martin Scorsese considers to be the best films of all time, but he’s not actually in favor of such rankings. Speaking to Time magazine for a video interview (see below), the “Taxi Driver” and “The Departed” icon said he is generally against top 10 best lists.

“I’ve tried to make lists over the years of films I personally feel are my favorites, whatever that means,” Scorsese said. “And then you find out that the word ‘favorite’ has different levels: Films that have impressed you the most, as opposed to films you just like to keep watching, as opposed to those you keep watching and learning from, or experiencing anew. So, they’re varied. And I’m always sort of against ’10 best’ lists.”

Scorsese gathered his favorite films into a list as recently as last December, when he participated...

Exclusive: The Kinoteka Polish Film Festival has set the lineup for its 21st edition, running March 9 — April 27 at venues across London.

The festival will open at the Institute of Contemporary Arts with the UK Premiere of Polish filmmaker Damian Kocur’s debut feature, Bread and Salt.

Inspired by true events, the pic follows Tymek, a young and talented student of the Warsaw Academy of Music who returns to his provincial hometown for vacation. Upon his return, he discovers that the central meeting point for local youth is a newly created kebab bar. Tymek witnesses a growing conflict between the shop workers, who are Arabs, and his friends from the neighborhood, leading to a conflict that will turn out to be tragic. The film debuted at Venice last year.

The festival will close with a gala screening of the 1977 film Top Dog (Wodzirej) at the Cine Lumiere in South Kensington. Causing...

Andrzej Wajda’s most celebrated film in the West is a serious thriller about doubt and corruption in a Poland ‘liberated’ by the Soviet Union. It has a cerebral script and a hero with a hipster attitude befitting a window of relative freedom briefly given to Polish filmmakers. Touted as the James Dean of the Eastern Bloc, the dashing Zbigniew Cybulski cuts an image as clean as J.F.K.. But his character, an assassin working for the reactionaries, undergoes a crisis of conscience. The miracle is that the Party censors allowed any doubt as to what our hero’s path should be. Given a stylized, almost expressionist B&w look, Wajda’s masterpiece is an intelligent thinkpiece that lays off the direct propagandizing.

Ashes and Diamonds

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 285

1958 / B&W / 1:66 widescreen / 103 min. / Popiól I Diament / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date August 24, 2021 / 39.95

Starring: Zbigniew Cybulski, Ewa Krzyzewska,...

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Criterion Collection has a slew of new releases coming your way to amp up your list of summer movie must-haves. Criterion specializes in restoring and distributing “important classic and contemporary” films from around the world. And with a catalog of over 1,400 ranging from avant-garde to Westerns, film noir to science fiction, their impressive selection has something for even the toughest movie critic. These specialized movies are complete with revamped rare finds, as well as exclusive in-depth commentary, and fascinating analysis.

Below, check out new Criterion Collection pre-orders for the month of July and August. Click here for more Criterion Collection movies to add to your film vault.

“La Piscine”

Release Date: July 20

Buy:...

The Criterion Collection have unveiled their August 2021 lineup and while it’s a bit of a lighter month with only four releases, there are a few stand-outs. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s greatest achievement After Life, which imagines the single memory one would take with them into eternity, will arrive in the collection.

D. A. Pennebaker’s immersive documentary Company, exploring the making of Stephen Sondheim’s musical, is also coming in August. Michael Snydel and Kyle Turner recently discussed the film on Intermission, and one can listen to the conversation below.

Andrzej Wajda’s landmark Polish war drama Ashes and Diamonds will receive a Blu-ray upgrade and, lastly, just in time for No Time to Die, Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation will mark another Netflix release for Criterion. Here’s hoping the promised release of Mati Diop’s Atlantics and the potential debut of Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind...

In today’s film news roundup, MGM beefs up its executive ranks, “Sea Fever” gets a live-streaming premiere, “Pigeon Kings” finds a home and The 92nd Street Y has started an online film course.

Executive Hires

Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s Film Group Chairman Michael De Luca has hired Elishia Holmes and Johnny Pariseau — both who were executives at De Luca’s eponymous production company.

De Luca joined MGM earlier this year. Holmes will serve as an executive vice president at MGM and Pariseau joins the studio as senior vice president. Both are already underway in their new roles.

Holmes joined Michael De Luca productions in 2015 overseeing projects including “Reminiscence,” starring Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson, and Rachel Morrison’s “Flint Strong,” written by Barry Jenkins and starring Ice Cube. Holmes previously worked for Ridley Scott as a producer at Scott Free and worked on “Exodus: Gods and Kings,” “Alien Covenant,...

If you’re looking to take a break from binge-watching garbage television and exercise your brain during quarantine, film historian Annette Insdorf and 92Y might have a perfect solution for you. Beginning Sunday, March 29, you can take the online film course “Reel Pieces Remote: Classic Films with Annette Insdorf,” for five weeks every Sunday at 8 p.m.

The five films she has selected — all of them indisputable masterpieces — can be streamed on The Criterion Channel. You can view the film any time before the Sunday night class, along with a prerecorded introduction from Insdorf, followed by the weekly lecture that will also engage live group discussion. Signing up for the 92Y class includes a free Criterion Channel trial membership good for 45 days. The cost for the five courses altogether is $150 — not free by any means, if you’re in the position to enroll.

More from IndieWireThe Show Must Go On:...

Act Like a Man is a column examining male screen performers past and present, across nationality and genre. If movie stars reflect the needs and desires of their audience in any particular era, examining their personas, popularity, fandom, and specific appeals has plenty to tell us about the way cinema has constructed—and occasionally deconstructed—manhood on our screens.In the postwar Polish cinema, it’s difficult to overstate the revolutionary difference presented by the screen appearance of Zbigniew Cybulski. In a nation so thoroughly devastated by the Nazi occupation and the horrors of Stalinism, Cybulski and his generation helped represent the future, though not unchecked by the nightmares of the past. In his short 39 years, he starred in dozens of films—the most prominent of which were collaborations with close friend Andrzej Wajda. In 1956, what would later be called “the thaw” would help spring Polish filmmakers from creative prison.

For auteurists in New York there can hardly be a better series playing right now than "Trilogies" at Film Forum: a four-week extravaganza of 78 films comprising 26 mini director retrospectives from Angelopoulos to Wenders and 24 other auteurs in between. Many of the groupings in the series are actual sequential trilogies, like Kobayashi’s The Human Condition or Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, while others more loosely stretch the term, such as Lucrecia Martel’s "Salta Trilogy" or Hou Hsiao-hsien’s "Coming of Age Trilogy," very welcome though those are.Very few of the trilogies in the series, however, have posters that were conceived as trios themselves, the French posters for Kieslowski’s Three Colors, above, and Albert Dubout’s cartoony designs for Marcel Pagnol’s Marseilles Trilogy being the major exceptions. There are two terrific matching posters by Jan Lenica for the first two films in Mark Donskoy's Maxim Gorky Trilogy,...

Keep up with the always-hopping film festival world with our weekly Film Festival Roundup column. Check out last week’s Roundup right here.

Lineup Announcements

– Exclusive: Jcc Manhattan’s 5th Annual Israel Film Center Festival announced its complete line-up of feature films from acclaimed Israeli filmmakers. The festival, which highlights Israel’s latest groundbreaking cinema and also features conversations among industry creative, runs June 8 – 13, 2017 with two pre-festival previews on May 21, and May 23, at Jcc Manhattan, 334 Amsterdam Avenue at 76th Street.

Highlights of this year’s film line-up include the New York premieres of Meni Yaish’s “Our Father,” Erez Tadmor’s “Home Port,” Roee Florentin’s “Mr. Predictable,” and a special preview of “Aida’s Secrets,” set to open in theaters in the fall. Most films included in this year’s slate are New York premieres.

This year’s festival includes popular films coming out of Israel’s industry. “Most...

A month after the world premiere of what ended up being his final film, Andrzej Wajda passed away at 90 last year. To honor the Polish master, whose career spanned decades, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is holding an 11-film tribute next month. It begins with the New York premiere of “Afterimage,” his unintentional swan song.

Read More: Andrzej Wajda, Academy Award–Winning Icon of Polish Cinema, Dies at 90

“A Generation,” “Kanał” and “Ashes and Diamonds” — better known as Wajda’s war trilogy — will also be featured, as will his 1981 Palme d’Or winner “Man of Iron” and the film it serves as a loose sequel to, 1977’s “Man of Marble.” “The Conductor,” “Innocent Sorcerers,” “The Maids of Wilko,” “The Promised Land” and “Rough Treatment” (aka “Without Anesthesia”) round out the program, and all but “Afterimage” will screen on 35mm.

Read More: Mubi Unveils New Discoveries Series Highlighting International Film...

We pay tribute to the film stars and directors from around the world who sadly passed away in 2016.Hector BabencoArgentine-born Brazilian director Hector Babenco died on July 13 at 70-years-old.He found international success with Brazilian slum drama Pixote (1981), going on to make Kiss Of

We pay tribute to the film stars and directors from around the world who sadly passed away in 2016.

Hector Babenco

Argentine-born Brazilian director Hector Babenco died on July 13 at 70-years-old.

He found international success with Brazilian slum drama Pixote (1981), going on to make Kiss Of The Spider Woman (1985), for which he earned a best director Oscar nominee and William Hurt earned an Oscar win for best actor.

Babenco went on to direct Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson in Ironweed (1987) and Tom Berenger and John Lithgow in At Play In The Fields Of The Lord (1991).

After undergoing cancer treatment in the 1990s, he returned to the director’s chair for films including Brazilian prison...

Episode Links Past Wish List Episodes Episode 63.9 – Disc 3 – Top Criterion Blu-ray Upgrades for 2011 Episode 110 – Criterion Collection Blu-ray Upgrade Wish List for 2012 Episode 136 – Criterion Collection Blu-ray Upgrade Wish List for 2013 Episode 146 – Criterion Collection Blu-ray Upgrade Wish List for 2014 Episode 154 – Criterion Collection Blu-ray Upgrade Wish List for 2015 Episode 169 – Criterion Collection Blu-ray Upgrade Wish List for 2016 DVD to BluRay Wish Lists Aaron: The Shop on Main Street Pickup on South Street Arik: Cleo from 5 to 7 Berlin Alexanderplatz Mark: Taste of Cherry Sisters David: Do the Right Thing Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters Ld to Blu-Ray Wish Lists Aaron: Blue Velvet (Announced as Ld Spine #219 but never released) Early Hitchcock Box (Sabotage, The Secret Agent, Young and Innocent, The Lodger, The Man Who Knew Too Much) Arik: A Night at the Opera Singin’ in the Rain Mark: 2001: A Space Odyssey The Producers David: I Am Cuba Letter From an Unknown Woman...

The world premiere of Ritesh Batra’s adaptation of the Julian Barnes novel starring Jim Broadbent and Charlotte Rampling will kick off proceedings at the 28th annual Palm Springs International Film Festival on January 5.

The Sense Of An Ending (pictured) is Batra’s second film after The Lunchbox and will open through CBS films on March 10.

Taylor Hackford’s The Comedian starring Robert De Niro will close the event (Spc opens the film on January 13) as festival brass unveiled the full roster of Premieres, New Voices/New Visions, Modern Masters, True Stories and After Dark.

World premieres include Colin Hanks’s Eagles Of Death Metal: Nos Amis (Our Friends) (Us-France); Andrew Wagner’s Breakable You (Us) starring Holly Hunter, Tony Shalhoub and Alfred Molina; Catalina Aguilar Mastretta’s Everybody Loves Somebody (Mexico); and Simon Aboud’s The Beautiful Fantastic (UK-us).

Rounding out the world premieres are: The Concessionaires Must Die! (Us) by [link...

Boguslaw Linda in Andrzej Wajda's final film Afterimage

Richard Peña, who was the Director of the New York Film Festival for 25 years and is currently an advisor for the Rome Film Festival, shares his memories of meeting Andrzej Wajda for the first time when he was participating in organizing a retrospective on Polish Cinema. The last time they met Wajda taught a master class at Columbia University where Peña is a professor of Film Studies.

Ashes And Diamonds

Andrzej Wajda's Afterimage is Poland's submission to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Best Foreign Language Film and will be screened at the Rome Film Festival. In 2015, Ida, directed by Pawel Pawlikowski won the Oscar. Andrzej Wajda received an honorary Oscar in 2000.

"I first met Andrzej Wajda in 1996, when I helped organise a 50+-film historical retrospective on Polish Cinema. Mr. Wajda came for the opening weekend as part of a delegation that.

NEWSAndrzej WajdaJust under a month since his latest film, Afterimage, received its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, the great Polish director Andrzej Wajda (Ashes and Diamonds, Man of Marble) has died at the age of 90.How precious two minutes of film can be! The Czech national film archives have identified a previously lost film by Georges Méliès, says The Guardian: "The two-minute silent film Match de Prestidigitation (“conjuring contest”) from 1904 was found on a reel given to the archives by an anonymous donor, labelled as another film."The digital home of films in the Criterion Collection have moved around over the years, and, as of October 19, will find a new access point as an add-on subscription to Turner's new streaming service, FilmStruck. The service launches October 19.French director F.J. Ossang has surprisingly turned to crowdfunding to finish his new feature, 9 Doigts ("9 Fingers"). Shot in black and white 35 mm,...

Andrzej Wajda Film School lecturer Volker Schlöndorff on the Return to Montauk set in New York Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

In Volker Schlöndorff's tribute to Andrzej Wajda, who died on Sunday, October 9, 2016, he recalls the impact he had on him and the actors the legendary director worked with, including Hannah Schygulla, Gerard Depardieu, Krystyna Janda, Daniel Olbrychski, Wojciech Pszoniak and Andrzej Chyra.

Andrzej Wajda on the set of Kanal

Volker has been teaching at the Andrzej Wajda Film School and in his remembrance he gives us an intimate portrait of a filmmaker who impressed him early on with Kanal, Ashes And Diamonds and The Promised Land, and even more later in life when he got to know the man behind the films.

Andrzej Wajda received an honorary Oscar in 2000 from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

"It is going to be a heavy walk and a beautiful day...

Polish film director whose own experiences inspired his acclaimed 1950s war trilogy A Generation, Kanał and Ashes and Diamonds

Polish cinema burst upon the world in the 1950s with Andrzej Wajda’s war trilogy, A Generation, Kanał and Ashes and Diamonds, with the director becoming the voice of disaffected postwar youth. A generation later, Wajda, who has died aged 90, was the voice of Poland again, as the country struggled to survive political and economic turmoil.

Wajda was born in Suwałki, in north-east Poland, the son of Aniela (nee Białowąs), a schoolteacher, and Jakub, a cavalry officer killed by the Soviets in 1940 in what was known as the Katyn massacre. It was many years before Wajda decided to cover the tragedy, making the film Katyń (2007).

Continue reading...

Revered director of Katyn and The Promised Land passed away on Sunday.

Polish cinema - and the international film community at large – are mourning the passing yesterday (Oct 9) of the Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda.

His career spanned more than 60 years and included such classics as Ashes And Diamonds, Innocent Sorcerers, The Wedding, Man Of Marble, and Man Of Iron. Four of his features were Oscar-nominated, and he received an honorary Academy Award in 2000.

Wajda had been a resistance fighter during the Second World War and a Fine Art student in Krakow before studying film directing at the Lodz Film School, his debut feature A Generation in 1954 being the first part of a trilogy completed by Canal (1956) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958).

The films introduced Wajda to an international audience.

In the early 1970s, he formed his own film unit, Film Studio ‘X’, where he worked with a group of young film-makers such as Ryszard Bugajski and Agnieska Holland, using...

Wajda fought communist censorship and truth-denying propaganda to produce formidable, patriotic films that illuminated Poland’s troubled past – and helped steer its history

Andrzej Wajda had a viable claim to be Poland’s great national artist of modern times, a virtual cinematic folk memory, a man who sought to intervene in Poland’s history with his movies, converting the ashes of bitterness and historical agony into diamonds of film. He was a director with Poland written on his heart.

Related: Andrzej Wajda: Ashes and Diamonds

Continue reading...

Afterimage, which is Poland's submission for this year's foreign language Oscar Polish film director Andrez Wajda - who made more than 40 films during his career - has died at age 90.

He once said: "We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be."

It was an idea that he carried into his films - including Katyn, Ashes And Diamonds and Man Of Iron - which frequently drew on the Communist history and wartime strife in Poland.

He was still working up until his death and his film Afterimage - about avant-garde artist Wladyslaw Strzeminski - was recently been selected as Poland’s foreign language Oscar submission. He has been nominated for the foreign language award four times before and he received an honorary Oscar "for five decades of extraordinary film direction" in 2000.

The former Polish prime minister and the...

Andrzej Wajda, an enormously influential icon of Polish cinema who received an honorary Academy Award in 2000, has died at the age of 90. According to fellow filmmaker Jacek Bromski, who spoke to The Hollywood Reporter, Wajda was recently hospitalized and passed away earlier today.

Read More: Marc Webb To Direct Non-‘Spider-Man’ Spy Flick, Andrzej Wajda Preps Biopic & More

Best known for his war trilogy of “A Generation,” “Kanal” and especially “Ashes and Diamonds,” he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film on four occasions over the course of more than 30 years: “The Promised Land,” “The Maids of Wilko,” “Man of Iron” and “Katyń”; “Man of Iron” won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or. His most recent film, “Afterimage,” screened in Toronto and was selected as Poland’s Oscar submission; though not intended as such, it serves as the swan song of a nonpareil career that lasted more than six decades.

Movie Poster of the Week has just returned from sunny Spain, so I thought it was high time I highlighted the work of the great Spanish cartelista, Macario Gómez Quibus, better known by his distinctive signature “Mac.”Now 90 years old, the incredibly prolific artist—over the years he has reportedly produced some 4,000 pieces of movie art—worked in a variety of styles. He often repainted American posters almost verbatim, albeit in his own more vivacious brushstrokes, but the posters that initially caught my eye were his more sui generis works. His gothic rendering of Rebecca is in stark contrast to most American and international posters for the film that feature Olivier and Fontaine pensively cheek-to-cheek. And his poster for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, again notably centered on a silhouette, is quite unlike any other design for the film. He could be both a painterly realist and a graphic stylist, often...

★★★★★ It has been sixty years since the release of Andrzej Wajda's first film, Generation (1955), and in that time he has directed over fifty more. 1975's The Promised Land, which was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 42nd Academy Awards, is one of his very best. That's no mean feat in a filmography brimming with social deconstruction and boasting riches like Ashes and Diamonds (1958) and Man of Marble (1977). Based on the novel of the same name by Nobel laureate Wladyslaw Reymont, Wajda's drama paints an absorbing portrait of late 19th century Poland, caught in the vice-like grip of commercialism.

★★★★★ In 1956 there was a seismic political shift in Poland known variously as the Polish Thaw or Polish October. The Stalinist period ended and the entire country went through a process of comparable liberalisation that naturally extended to the filmmaking community. Free of the constraints placed upon the medium by the Soviet Union - which shackled both narrative opposition and formal experimentation - the likes of Andrzej Wajda were able to cast off their irons. With social realism no longer imposed as a matter of course, Wajda set about making the third feature in what is now referred to as his 'war trilogy'; the remarkable and deeply symbolic, Ashes and Diamonds (1958).

★★★☆☆ Surreality dons a cool sixties swagger in Polish novelist Tadeusz Konwicki's intriguing and vaguely baffling Jump (1965). Abandoning the social realism with which many of his cinematic compatriots approached the medium in the aftermath of the war - and with which he initially made his name in print - he creates an elliptical and illusory narrative. It's constructed around its star Zbigniew Cybulski, who is decked in a leather jacket and dark glasses, channeling James Dean as well as his own earlier role in Andrzej Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds (1958). An amalgamation of fraudster and messiah, his absurdist sojourn in a small hamlet prods at the veneer of identities rebuilt from the rubble.

It’s the sunglasses that are the clue. If you want to understand the influence of Polish cinema on American director Martin Scorsese, look at Zbigniew Cybulski, “the Polish James Dean”. In Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds (1958), Cybulski plays Maciek, a young patriot fighting against the communists in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War who is seldom seen without his pair of shades.

First Run Film Festival runs April 16th-19th at Nyu’s Cantor Film Center showcasing amongst the best films coming out of Tisch School of the Arts at Nyu. The festival features promising filmmakers short films as they journey towards leaving an imprint with their feature films. LatinoBuzz wanted to show some love to Latino filmmakers representing at this years festival. Remember these names!

Omar ZÚÑIGA Hidalgo – "San Cristobal"

LatinoBuzz: Why film and what do you want to ultimately want to say?

Omar: I became interested in film as a viewer when I was a teenager. I would spend entire afternoons in an arthouse theater in downtown Santiago. I didn't really expect to be a filmmaker back then. But it was clearly an interest. During the years that followed I discovered the passion slowly, I went to a communications undergrad in Chile, and then to Nyu for my Mfa. I don't see myself doing anything else now. I'm interested in the visual language that it has, and also in how emotional it can be. There are themes that I unconsciously come back to, There is no deliberate objective. Every film comes out of an intuition, where I'm at, at that moment in particular. But looking back on my work, somehow I get back to masculinity and how men are taught to avoid showing how fragile they can be, or to people who are in constant movement (which is what I've been doing for the past few years). I seem to want to explore these types of characters.

LatinoBuzz: You are younger than the current wave of Chilenos, and I brought it up with Marialy Rivas and Andres Wood, but they grew up under the dictatorship and I was curious how it affected them as they became artists. What about Chile conditioned you?

Omar: Dictatorship didn't affect me directly. I was born just a few years before it ended, so I don't have clear memories of it. I've only learned about its devastating nature after the fact. There is something eminently Chilean about avoiding confrontation, or about not clarifying the way you feel sometimes. It's a particular culture, where emotions are not discussed as profusely with your family or friends, nor shown in an explicit manner. I believe that's something that's somehow in my work, where people can't articulate too clearly how they feel about things. It is very familiar and natural to me to not have to define so exactly the nature of actions that people take. We don't have that over-analyzing attitude about things.

LatinoBuzz: Pick a film to re-make (you have to!) Who is the lead?

Omar: I wouldn't remake a film.

LatinoBuzz: Where to next?

Omar: "San Cristóbal" will continue its route internationally this year. I am also developing a feature project based on the short, and trying to put together its financing. It's always incredibly difficult, but we're trying to make our best. - omar@cinestacion.cl

Paulo Henrique Falsarella Testolini – "Suriname Gold"

LatinoBuzz: Why film and what do you ultimately want to say?

Paulo: I'm not sure exactly how film came to me and why, I guess it was just a natural progression from recording my parents expeditions when I was a kid, playing with the camera in high-school and escaping (as much as I could) the business future my family had intended for me. In the end, film was the best way to put myself into endless adventures, while attempting to tell the world the many stories that can be uncovered on the way. There are always stories out there, tales of bravery from every corner of the world - they can seem so exotic, yet so relatable to our modern society.

LatinoBuzz: Suriname, obviously is not considered a 'Latino' nation but does have a fascinating place in South American - where did the idea to shoot there come from?

Paulo: It was late 2009, the last Sunday of the year, and I sat in my living room listening to the news about an attack in the gold mines of Suriname. It was very weird - though I had grown up in Suriname's neighboring country of Brazil, I didn't know much about the place, let alone its gold and the thousands of lives migrating across the borders in search of it. The more I researched about that fascinating land, the more I craved to visit it and learn about that little corner of the world of which so few people have heard. What I've tried to do with Suriname Gold is reveal a human story within a somewhat hidden world, the characters may be fictional, but their experiences are real. My hope is that viewers will be entertained by the film's sense of adventure, and more importantly, that audiences will learn something new about this complex nation and the continuous exploitation of the Amazon (and the lives taken on the way).

LatinoBuzz: Pick a film to re-make (you have to!) Who is the lead?

Paulo: That's a hard one... I would love to make a new version of Disney's "Newsies", more based on the play than the 90s movie. The lead? I've always wanted to work with English actor Jamie Bell, a great inspiration when I was first getting into film. One day, right?

LatinoBuzz: Where to next?

Paulo: It's been some years now since we shot the short film of Suriname Gold. I've been developing, with the producers, the feature length version of that story, as well as some other scripts that are set in that environment. Once the story reaches the right point, I hope to gather our adventurous crew and cast back together, fly to the Amazon and embark on this journey again. - pht218@nyu.edu

Reinaldo Green - "Stop"

LatinoBuzz: Why film and what do you ultimately want to say?

Reinaldo: Film is still one of the few mediums that you can reach a mass audience. It's an opportunity and a platform to share content with depth, meaning, culture, and value, regardless of genre, to inspire and make people think. Ultimately I want to use the art form to share, inspire and make meaningful change in people's lives. My favorite movies have had profound meaning in my life well past the end credits.

LatinoBuzz: Did the tragic deaths of young males of color propel you to write 'Stop' or is it something that has long lingered?

Reinaldo: The genius of the film has been something that had been brewing for a while. It really came into focus for me with the Trayvon Martin/ George Zimmerman decision. I thought to myself, what if that were me? What if I was walking home at night and a cop stopped me, what would I do if I were in that situation? So, we decided to make a film about it.

LatinoBuzz: Pick a film to re-make (you have to!) Who is the lead?

Reinaldo: I'd remake "Drive" with Benicio Del Toro. There's nothing wrong with the original, I just think it'd be a fun experiment.

LatinoBuzz: Where to next?

Reinaldo: The Green Brothers will be making a feature (or two) over the next year, look out for them!

Twitter @greenbrosfilms / Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greenbrosfilms - rmg412@nyu.edu

Carlos Valdivia – "Writing Lessons"

LatinoBuzz : Why film and what do you want to ultimately want to say?

Carlos: Why not film? I think cinematic storytelling is the most impactful. It has the greatest reach out of any art form. My focus has always been to increase the representation and visibility of people (particularly Lgbtq people and people of color) that are often neglected or completely erased from the big screen. I'd like to do it with empathy and intelligence, but without ever diluting the complexity of individuals and their lived experiences. So I'd say I ultimately want to challenge preconceived notions with authenticity.

LatinoBuzz : How much yourself turns up in your narrative?

Carlos: A lot! With "Writing Lessons" I wanted to recreate a most exciting time and place from my first year in New York, when I moved here to attend Nyu as a freshman. My best friend and I both ended up getting in with a crowd of much older Columbia academics and we were regular guests at their gatherings where we were by far the youngest people. It was very exciting and I was always fascinated by the convergence of young naiveté and older indifference and how people often desire the one they don't have. Young people trying to grow up too quickly and older people who wish to be younger is a central source of conflict in the film. At the same time, I also wanted the film to reflect the experience of being the only person of color in almost exclusively white environments. I purposely had Julian be the only non-white person in the narrative. Julian is fascinated by his professor's world but he will never really be a part of it. I strongly relate to being an outsider with a desire to fit in. Even though race is never explicitly stated in the film, it's clear that he will always be an outsider in this environment. I think this is how race operates in highly liberal environments today, rarely spoken out loud and yet still relevant and highly impactful.

LatinoBuzz : Pick a film to re-make (you have to!) Who is the lead?

Carlos: This is a tough one. Generally, I'm not a fan of remakes. But I'd love to remake Ingmar Bergman's "Cries and Whispers" with Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayek as sisters, playing the Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Thulin roles. Maybe Gina Rodriguez can play their dying sister. That would be a dream project.

LatinoBuzz: Where to next?

Carlos: I finished Writing Lessons very recently, so I've only just begun submitting it to film festivals where I hope the film can get some exposure. After that, I'll definitely be sharing it online. Programmers, call me/email me! - carlos.e.valdivia@gmail.com

Fidel Ruiz-healy- "A Band of Thieves"

LatinoBuzz: Why film and what do you want to ultimately want to say?

Fidel: Unfortunately I make films because I don’t know how to do anything else. It’s all I’ve thought about since elementary school and when it came to growing up and picking a career I feel like I didn’t really have a choice in the matter. I think your films grow up with you so what you want to say with them all comes down to what you are currently living through. I think films are inherently influenced by the social and political environments that surround you and its up to the writer to choose how on the nose they want to be.

LatinoBuzz: How important was shooting in Texas? Do you feel it shaped you as a storyteller?

Fidel: The movie had to be in Texas. It’s about the crazy things you do when its 100 degrees outside and creating a lawless playground to play cowboy. For me the only place for that is Texas. When looking up references from old westerns and bank heist movies, I quickly realized that what I was looking for was just locales I saw growing up. After that it was just a matter of finding out how to produce a film in San Antonio from New York, and that’s what we did. In terms of being shaped as a storyteller by Texas, I think everyone is influenced a bit by the city they grew up in. At he end of the day that’s what shapes your image of the world. The people and places you interact with as a kid define your perspective on things, and for me that was growing up around the San Antonio suburbs wanting to live life like I saw in the movies.

LatinoBuzz: Pick a film to re-make (you have to!) Who is the lead?

Fidel: It would have to be "Alphaville". It’s one of my favorites. Remaking a Godard films seems like some kind of filmic taboo, so that would make it hard. You would have to get it right or else a lot of people would hate you, (Remember the remake of Breathless? Not very many people do) so finding the way to recreate that film in a modern context seems like a great challenge. As for the lead, I have no idea. Maybe someone from Texas? I’m kind of going through a weird Texas love phase in my life right now, so instinctively I’m leaning towards some Texan faces. But either way, I would have to watch the imaginary casting tapes with my casting director a couple of times to make a final decision. But maybe I would just be forced to make it with talking CGI farm animals - "Alphaville" for kids. Maybe that’s the best approach and one Godard would respect. Mr. Godard if you’re reading this - Just picture this: CGI farm animals as Lemmy Caution and Natacha von Braun.

LatinoBuzz: Where to next?

Fidel: I’m currently writing a feature and developing a short film that deals with the border violence in south Texas. It’s kind of like Blood Simple meets Halloween but in the desert. I’m looking to shoot later this year in West Texas. - fidelrrh@gmail.com

Carlos Arata – "An Evening with Oliver"

LatinoBuzz: Why film and what do you want to ultimately want to say?

Carlos: Film is the ultimate medium through which to tell stories, and when I was younger, it was a way of visually expressing myself. Now, it’s become a way for me to see the world as I did then. When you are young, everything is fresh, magical – you don’t have to have it all figured out. You experience a lot of things for the first time, with a heightened sense of reality…and naivety, too, and it’s wonderful. The world is much more interesting that way. I want my audience to experience the most fascinating version of the world, to feel their feelings in a way they haven’t in a long time, and to look at the world in a way they don’t normally do.

LatinoBuzz: Is there a particular childhood memory you would like to realize in a film of yours one day?

Carlos: I have a distinct memory of being lost in Disneyland at five-years-old. I would like to revisit that experience of roaming the park alone – The feeling of being lost against the backdrop of the "happiest place on earth" interests me.

LatinoBuzz: Pick a film to re-make (you have to!) Who is the lead?

Carlos: If I could remake any film it would have to be "The Warriors." I used to and still watch the film all the time, and caught it whenever it played at the nearby art house. It has an amazing vibe, and of course, a story that is still relevant in our day. I’d cast Chris Pratt as Swan, Kid Cudi as Cochise, and Danny Trejo involved somewhere in the mix.

LatinoBuzz: Where to next?

Carlos: I’m developing a feature version of my short film, "An Evening with Oliver," and in the process of writing an animated feature, as well as a TV pilot (and of course, looking for opportunities to produce both!) - carlosaratafilms@gmail.com

Felipe Prado - "Partiu"

LatinoBuzz: Why film and what do you ultimately want to say?

Felipe: I grew up with my mother taking me and my brother Joao (who produced "Partiu") to watch “cult” movies - as we used to call them - during the week; and my father making us watch Scorsese’s filmography with him during the weekend. Quite inappropriate for kids, but it taught me a lot about movies and shaped who I am. I believe in films that make the audience uncomfortably entertained and have people walking out of the theater with their subconscious still in the story. It needs to be breathtaking and bring new perspectives.

LatinoBuzz: Which is the ‘Brasil' you would like the world to see through your lens?

Felipe: A ‘Brasil’ through unpleasant reality based films with characters, personalities and events deconstructed to their core, avoiding the common subjects that have already been over-explored. Certain stories need to be told, but not as many times as it has been done over the last few years. Brazil is much more than “cine-favela” and soap-opera-like comedies. "Central Station," "City of God" and the "Elite Squad" movies are great, but not every Brazilian film needs to be like them. With very few exceptions, in the last few years those were the themes explored by the majority of the films produced in our culturally diverse country. Brasil is desperate for new stories that don’t underestimate the audience.

LatinoBuzz: Pick a film to re-make (you have to!) Who is the lead?

Felipe: That’s are many choices, but I would really love to adapt ‘Ashes and Diamonds’ to the current South American political turmoil. There are a few recent cases of assassinations of prosecutors and whistleblowers that could base a great remake. The lead… Joao Miguel, who’s in ‘Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures’, ‘Xingu’ and many other great films. In my opinion he’s one of the most complete actors in Brazil’s cinema.

LatinoBuzz: Where to next?

Felipe: I am currently working on a story of faith and corruption involving money-making mega-churches. I am also working on a feature version of "Partiu" as I created the short in order to explore the subject in deep. This is also my thesis project for Nyu Tisch School of the Arts. - felipe.prado@nyu.edu

You can find screening times and more info at: http://www.firstrunfestival.com/

Written by Juan Caceres . LatinoBuzz is a feature on SydneysBuzz that highlights Latino indie talent and upcoming trends in Latino film with the specific objective of presenting a broad range of Latino voices. Follow [At]LatinoBuzz on Twitter and Facebook...

Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese describes the impact that the restless, dynamic films made by great Polish directors from Roman Polanski to Andrzej Wajda have had on his work

As for many other people, my introduction to Polish cinema came with Andrzej Wajda’s trilogy: Ashes and Diamonds, Kanal and A Generation – actually, they were released out of order here in the Us, and we saw Kanal first, followed quickly by Ashes, both in 1961, and then we got to see A Generation later. Among the three, it was Ashes and Diamonds that had the greatest impact on me. It announced the arrival of a master film-maker. It was one of the last pictures that gave us a real testament of the impact of the war, on Wajda and on his nation. It introduced us to a whole school of film-making, related to what was coming out of the Soviet Union but quite distinct.

Golden Globes are considering “Ida” directed and co-written by Pawel Pawlikowski (“Last Resort", “My Summer of Love"), a moving and intimate drama about a young novitiate nun in 1960's Poland who, on the verge of taking her vows, discovers a dark family secret dating from the terrible years of the Nazi occupation. The film premiered at the 2013 Telluride Film Festival and was also featured at the 2013 Toronto and 2014 Sundance film festivals.

“Ida” won the 2014 European Film Awards for Best European Film, Best European Director, Best European Screenwriter, Best European Cinematographer and the People’s Choice Award. The film was named the Best Foreign Language Film by the New York Film Critics Circle and won the 2014 Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards for Best Supporting Actress (Agata Kulesza) and Best Foreign Language Film. "Ida" is also nominated for the 2014 Film Independent Spirit Award for Best International Film. It's also the Polish Oscar® entry and has made the 9-film shortlist.

Below is my interview with director Pawel Pawlikowski published last year prior to the film theatrical release:

I happen to love Jewish films and so when I saw "Ida" was playing in Toronto, it was first on my list of “must-sees”. However, I am no longer an “acquisitions” person, nor am I a film reviewer. My work keeps me out of the screening room because we work with filmmakers looking to get their films into the hands of those who will show their films. In other words, we advise and strategize for getting new films into the film circuit’s festivals, distributors' and international sales agents’ hands.

So I missed Ida at its Tiff debut. In Cartagena, where I was invited to cover the festival for SydneysBuzz and where I was gathering information for the book I have just completed on Iberoamerican Film Financing, it showed again in the jewel-box of a theater in this jewel-box of a city. But when I saw the first shots – and fell in love with it – I also saw it was subtitled in Spanish and rather than strain over translating, I left the theater. Later on, Pawel Pawlikowski and I sat next to each other at a fabulous dinner in one of Cartagena’s many outdoor squares, and we discussed the title of my book rather than his films which was a big loss on one hand but a big gain for me on the other because we got to speak as “civilians” rather than keeping the conversation on a “professional” level.

Read More: Review 'Ida' by Carlos Aguilar

Now Music Box is opening Ida in L.A. on May 2, 2014 at the Laemmle in L.A. and in N.Y. and I made sure to take advantage of my press status, not only to see the film but to interview Pawel on himself and the film.

There were two ways to look at this film: as a conceit, as in, “what a great story – a girl about to take her vows in the convent which raised her discovers she is Jewish and returns to the society which destroyed her family” -- or as a journey of a fresh soul into the heart of humanity and finds that she is blessed by being able to decide upon her own destiny within it.

Parenthetically, this seems to me to be a companion piece to the Berlinale film "Stations of the Cross", another journey of a fresh soul into the spiritual life of religion as she struggles in the society which formed her.

And so I began my interview with Pawel:

I could look at this film in two ways, I’ve heard the audiences talk about whether the film is Anti-Polish or Anti-Semitic, but that is not my concern, I want to know if it is just a great story or does it go deeper than that?

Pawel immediately responded, I Think he said, “I am not a professional filmmaker, and I do not make a ‘certain type of film’. I make films depending on where I am in life. A film about exile, a film about first love. Films mark where I am in my life.

In the '60s, when I was a kid and first saw the world this was how I depicted it in this film…seeing the world for the first time…life is a journey and filmmaking marks where you (the audience) are in life and it marks where I am in life. Each film is different as a result.

After making "Woman on the 5th," about the hero’s (in my own head) being lost in Paris, a weird sort of production – directed by a Polish director with a British and an American actor and actress, I craved solid ground, a familiar place or a “return” to important things of the past, and I returned to a certain period in Poland which I found very much alive, for myself then and again as I made this movie and in Polish history itself.

Ida takes place 17 years after the war and shortly after after Stalin’s crimes were being made public by Krushchev. The Totalitarian State of Poland bent a bit; censorship was lifted a bit and a new culture was developing. Music was jazz and rock and roll. Poland was very alive then: the spirit of going your own way, not caring what anyone thinks, creating a style in cinema, in art, music...

I myself was a young boy in the '60s and I left Poland in '71 when I was 13 to stay with my mother in England where she had married a Brit. My father lived in the West; they were divorced and I went for a holiday and stayed.

I went to school in the U.K. but at 13, I was thrown out and I went to Germany where my father lived and matriculated there. I couldn’t go back to Poland as I had left illegally and was only allowed back in to visit in the late '70s. I returned in 1980 during Solidarity and from 1989 to the fall of the Wall, I went back often.

Ida is a film about identity, family, faith, guilt, socialism and music. I wanted to make a film about history that wouldnʼt feel like a historical film— a film that is moral, but has no lessons to offer. I wanted to tell a story in which ʻeveryone has their reasonsʼ; a story closer to poetry than plot. Most of all, I wanted to steer clear of the usual rhetoric of the Polish cinema. The Poland in "Ida" is shown by an ʻoutsiderʼ with no ax to grind, filtered through personal memory and emotion, the sounds and images of childhood…

I read you are going to make another film about Poland…

It is not about Poland but it is set in Poland. I am working on three projects, which is how I work. I keep writing and find one of them has the legs to carry me…which one is not yet known.

You mentioned in an interview with Sight and Sound your top 10 films…

Yes, which ones did you like? They ask me this every year and every year the list changes for me. There are other good ones, like Once Upon a Time in Anatolia…they are not all the old classics and they are not necessarily my favorites or what I think are “the best”. Again they depend on where I am in my own life.

The ones I like on your list were Ashes and Diamonds which I saw in New York in my freshman year in college, "La Dolce Vita" …"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Some Like It Hot."

I actually think "8 ½" is more remarkable than "La Dolce Vita." I also like "Loves of a Blonde" very much….

I found "Ashes and Diamonds" so extraordinary, I then had to see the actor in "Man of Marble" which took me to the next "Man of Steel" and Man of…whatever... until I thought I knew Wadja. What did you make of this film?

I saw it later as I was too young when it came out in the '60s. I saw it in the '70s when it was already a classic. Its impact on me was that it was well-done and about something. It is a comment about a man who decides whether to fight or to live. It could be remade in any country coming out of civil war.

To return to Ida, I noticed stylistic choices you made that I would like you to comment on.

The landscapes and interiors were very large and sparse. Interiors always had someone in the back ground moving, arranging or walking by in silence.

Yes there is always some life and the movements of people in the background are like music in the film, though it is not really music…

Yes, the music in the film is great. The magnificence of the classical music someone is playing, like the aunt…

Yes I only want to use real music at times that real music is part of the story. I didn’t want film music. I wanted it to come out of silence. It is part of the scene like the background movement of people. Each piece means something. The pop songs were key from the start. They were fatally imprinted on my childhood memory. They really color the landscape. Coltrane and stuff came from my adult self.

Incidentally, the late '50s and early '60s were great for jazz in Poland. There was a real explosion: Komeda, Namyslowski, Stanko, Wroblewski... Apart from telling Idaʼs story, I wanted to conjure up a certain image of Poland, an image that I hold dear. My country may have been grey, oppressive and enslaved in the early '60s, but in some ways it was 'cooler' and more original than the Poland of today, and somehow more universally resonant.

Iʼm sure that lots of Poles with a chip on their shoulder, and there are many, will fail to notice the beauty, the love that went into our film—and will accuse me of damaging Poland's image by focusing on the melancholy, the provincial, the grotesque… And then there's the matter of a Polish farmer killing a Jewish family… thereʼs bound to be trouble. On the other hand, thereʼs also a Stalinist state prosecutor of Jewish origins, which might land me in hot water in other quarters. Still, I hope the film is sufficiently specific and un-rhetorical enough to be understood on its own terms.

The music Ida’s aunt was playing before she…what are your thoughts about her aunt?

Neither Ida nor her aunt is typical. Wanda’s imprimatur is that she has no self-pity, no regrets, no sentimentality.

She had fought in the resistance rather than raise a family. She had been a super idealistic Marxist, became a part of the New Establishment and got drawn into the games and hypocrisy, sending people to death for “impeding progress”.

She reminds me of my father in some ways. Her acerbic sense of humor. I gave her some of my father’s lines.

Where Did The Character Of Wanda Come From?

When I was doing my post-graduate degree at Oxford in the early '80s I befriended Professor Brus, a genial economist and reformist Marxist who left Poland in ʻ68. I was particularly fond of his wife Helena, who smoked, drank, joked and told great stories. She didn't suffer fools gladly, but she struck me as a warm and generous woman. I lost touch with the Bruses when I left Oxford, but some 10 years later I heard on BBC News that the Polish government was requesting the extradition of one Helena Brus-Wolinska, resident in Oxford, on the grounds of crimes against humanity. It turned out that the charming old lady had been a Stalinist prosecutor in her late twenties. Among other things, she engineered the death in a show trial of a completely innocent man and a real hero of the Resistance, General ‘Nil’ Fieldorf. It was a bit of a shock. I couldn't square the warm, ironic woman I knew with the ruthless fanatic and Stalinist hangman. This paradox has haunted me for years. I even tried to write a film about her, but couldnʼt get my head around or into someone so contradictory. Putting her into Idaʼs story helped bring that character to life. Conversely, putting the ex-believer with blood on her hands next to Ida helped me define the character and the journey of the young nun.

By 1956, illusions about society were gone. Stalin’s crimes were revealed in 1961, there was a change of government, a new generation was coming of age. Wanda was a judge they called “Red Wanda” and had sent enemies of the state to their deaths. The older generation was left high and dry. Communism had become a shabby reality. Her despair was apparent– she had been heroic and now the system was a joke.

And then some creature from the past pops up and makes her reveal all she had swept under the carpet. She drank too much, there was no love in her life, only casual sex. But still she was straight-ahead, directed and unstoppable.

And then after the revelations of what had become of their parents and her child, her sister returns to the convent. There is nowhere for her to go. She hits a wall. She is heroic and there is no place for her in society anymore.

And Ida? Why did you choose such a person?

Ida has multiple origins, the most interesting ones probably not quite conscious. Let's say that I come from a family full of mysteries and contradictions and have lived in one sort of exile or another for most of my life. Questions of identity, family, blood, faith, belonging, and history have always been present.

I'd been playing for years with the story of a Catholic nun who discovers sheʼs Jewish. I originally set it in ʻ68, the year of student protests and the Communist Party sponsored anti-Semitic purges in Poland. The story involved a nun a bit older than Ida, as well as an embattled bishop and a state security officer, and the whole thing was more steeped in the politics of the day. The script was turning out a little too schematic, thriller-ish and plotty for my liking, so I put Ida aside for a while and went to Paris to make The Woman In The Fifth . I was in a different place at the time.

When I came back to Ida, I had a much clearer idea of what I wanted the film to be. My cowriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz and I stripped the whole thing down, made it less plotty, the characters richer and less functional. Ida became younger, more inexperienced, more of a blank slate, a young girl on the brink of life. Also we moved the story to ʻ62, a more nondescript period in Poland, but also a time of which I have most vivid memories, my own impressions as a child - unaware of what was going on in the adult world, but all the more sensitive to images and sounds. Some shots in the film couldʼve come from my family album.

In the course of the film, Ida undergoes a change. She becomes energized. When she returns to the convent you can see it in her body movements. It is the only time we used a hand-held camera to depict the new energy she has acquired. She is going into the spiritual in a different way. The old way elicited a giggle from her; she had seen the sensuality of the novice nun bathing…whether she is returning to the convent to stay is left to the viewer to decide.

The viewer is brought into a space of associations they make on their own, the film is more like poetry where the feeling of the viewer is the private one of the viewer, not one the film imposes.

Yes, each woman enters a new reality and comes out changed, and I was left thinking there was nothing better of the two life choices, the “normal” life of love and family and the “spiritual” life of simple living and silent devotion. There needs to be some balance between the two, but what is that? I still don’t know.

On a last note: I noticed in the end credits you thanked Alfonso Cuarón. Why was that?

Yes he liked the film a lot. There were many people I thanked, like Agnieszka Holland. These are friends I can show my work to. They protect me against critics and festivals. This group of friends can also be nasty, but they are honest friends.

Thank you so much Pawel for your insights. I look forward to meeting you again “on the circuit”.

To my readers, here are the nuts and bolts of the film:

Music Box Films is the proud U.S. distributor of "Ida," the award-winning film written and directed by Pawel Pawlikowski. Ida world premiered at Telluride 2013 and Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the Fipresci Award for Best Film; then played the London Film Festival where it won Best Film, and was the Grand Prix winner at the Warsaw Film Festival. It played as an Official Selection in the 2014 Sundance and New York Jewish Film Festivals.

Poland 1962. Anna (newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska) is a beautiful eighteen-year-old woman, preparing to become a nun at the convent where she has lived since orphaned as a child. She learns she has a living relative she must visit before taking her vows, her mother’s sister Wanda. Her aunt, she learns, is not only a former hard-line Communist state prosecutor notorious for sentencing priests and others to death, but also a Jew. Anna learns from her aunt that she too is Jewish - and that her real name is Ida. This revelation sets Anna, now Ida, on a journey to uncover her roots and confront the truth about her family. Together, the two women embark on a voyage of discovery of each other and their past. Ida has to choose between her birth identity and the religion that saved her from the massacres of the Nazi occupation of Poland. And Wanda must confront decisions she made during the War when she chose loyalty to the cause before family.

Following his breakthrough films "Last Resort" and BAFTA-award winning "My Summer of Love," "Ida" marks Polish-born, British writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski's first film set in his homeland. Ida stars Agata Trzebuchowska and Agata Kulesza. It will open in Los Angeles on May 2 at the Laemmle's Royal. (Music Box Films, 80 minutes, unrated).

Its international producers, Eric Abraham (Portobello Pictures), Ewa Puszczynska (Opus Film), Piotr Dzieciol (Opus Film) and coproducer, Christian Falkenberg Husum of Denmark sold about 30 territories in Toronto and to date it has sold to 43 territories where the film has opened.

Argentina - Cdi Films, Australia - Curious Film, Austria - Polyfilm is still playing it and to date it has grossed Us$10,733. Benelux – Cineart where it is also still playing and has grossed Us$185,026 in Belgium and Us$131,247 in The Netherlands, Canada – Eyesteelfilm and Films We Like, Czech Republic – Aerofilms, Denmark - Camera Film, Denmark - Portobello Film Sales, France - Memento Films Distribution where in three weeks it grossed $3,192,706, Germany - Arsenal and Maxmedien where it grossed $24,010, Greece - Strada Films, Hungary - Mozinet Ltd., Israel - Lev Films (Shani Films), Italy - Parthenos where it grossed $681,460., Norway – Arthaus grossed $59,920, Poland – Soloban where it grossed $333,714, Portugal - Midas Filmes, Spain - Caramel Films is still playing it and to date it has grossed $408,085, Sweden - Folkets Bio, Switzerland - Frenetic, Taiwan - Andrews Film Co. Ltd, U.K. - Artificial Eye and Curzon, U.S. – Music Box and Film Forum.

Production

(Poland) An Opus Film, Phoenix Film production in association with Portobello Pictures in coproduction with Canal Plus Poland, Phoenix Film Poland. (International sales: Fandango Portobello, Copenhagen.) Produced by Eric Abraham, Piotr Dzieciol, Ewa Puszczynska. Coproducer, Christian Falkenberg Husum.

Crew

Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski. Screenplay, Pawlikowski, Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Camera (B&W), Lukasz Zal, Ryszard Lenczewski; editor, Jaroslaw Kaminski; production designers, Katarzyna Sobanska, Marcel Slawinski; costume designer, Aleksandra Staszko; Kristian Selin Eidnes Andersen; supervising sound editor, Claus Lynge; re-recording mixers, Lynge, Andreas Kongsgaard; visual effects, Stage 2; line producer, Magdalena Malisz; associate producer, Sofie Wanting Hassing.

With

Agata Kulesza, Agata Trzebuchowska, Dawid Ogrodnik, Joanna Kulig.

There's a body in a barrel in this week's lean, precise episode of Ripper Street. Here's Becky's review...

This review contains spoilers.

3.5 Heavy Boots

Reid lies on the brink in Susan’s home after the near-fatal shooting at the end of last week’s episode. Whitechapel reacts the only way it knows how; with violence and death, quickly spiraling out of control. In the care of Susan, Reid is shot through the abdomen and the head, which puts his recovery in the realms of a small miracle. In the cold light of day, Drake has been hiding away with Rose rather than facing the Whitechapel streets without his friend whilst Jackson naturally gets stinking drunk. However, it’s not long before a body in a barrel and a more bullish than usual Inspector Abberline gets them back on the case.

The first half of this series and the majority of...

The latest Ripper Street is a remarkable piece of drama with a heart-stopping climactic scene. Here's Becky's review...

This review contains spoilers.

3.4 Your Father. My Friend.

First of all, apologies for missing my review for last week’s episode, Ashes And Diamonds. Unfortunately, a combination of technical issues and personal circumstances meant that I couldn’t get my thoughts into writing. In brief, it was an episode in which the central mystery was weak, but the character work around it was strong, particularly that of Bennett Drake, stepping into the absence of Reid and doing so very well. It also shows that Jerome Flynn is more than capable of carrying the show.

The excellent character work from that episode carries over into Your Father, My Friend, as Rose’s sighting of Alice/Matilda running away from her captors prompts Drake to seek out his inspector and return him to Whitechapel.

Watch a preview clip from the next episode of Ripper Street exclusively on Digital Spy.

'Ashes and Diamonds' - the third offering from the period thriller's third series - will be available exclusively to Amazon Prime Instant Video customers from this Friday (November 21).

In the DS exclusive preview, Drake (Jerome Flynn) is seen consulting with Abberline (Clive Russell) in an attempt to defend Reid's terrible violence.

Drake is soon asked to take over the helm of H Division, but is far from keen to preside over his friend's desk.

Meanwhile, the mysterious death of a clairvoyant takes a reluctant Drake, Jackson and PC Grace into a world of devious charlatans capitalising on the grief of a sorrowful community.

Further questions arise when Drake and Jackson (Adam Rothenberg) meet one of the clairvoyant's grief-stricken clients, who unlocks the heart of a deceptive scheme.

Ripper Street: Cancellation, campaigns and...

 

Heading into a three-day holiday weekend, it's fairly quiet in terms of blockbuster releases (it won't be a surprise if Guardians Of The Galaxy continues to top the box-office chart despite recent newcomers), but Austin has plenty of specialty screenings to catch your attention. 

Austin Film Society is screening Roger Corman's bizarre postapocalyptic 1971 film Gas-s-s-s screening tonight and again on Sunday afternoon in 35mm at the Marchesa. On Wednesday night, Afs will also be offering a preview screening of No No: A Dockumentary (Caitlin's review) with director Jeffrey Radice, producer Mike Blizzard and editor Sam Wainwright Douglas in attendance. The film, which premiered at SXSW earlier this year, tells the story of how Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter while on LSD in the 1970s. It's expected to open at Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar next weekend and will also be available on VOD. We also get a new Essential Cinema series,...

The Criterion Collection has just released a new filmmaker top ten and this time it's Martin Scorsese getting the honors and he has quite a lot to say about each. The list includes obvious titles such as The Red Shoes, 8 1/2, The Leopard, Ashes and Diamonds and others as they were all on his list of Top 12 Films of All-Time from back in 2012. Nevertheless, it remains fascinating to read his words and reasoning. For example, I find it interesting to see him placing Roberto Rossellini's Paisan at #1. So often Rome Open City is the most talked about of Rossellini's fabulous War Trilogy (read my review) and so infrequently you hear about Paisan or Germany Year Zero, the latter of which is an absolute stunner. I've never sen Jean Renoir's The River or Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano, but the rest I've viewed. I'm not a huge fan of The Leopard,...

At one time, Marc Webb was the guy who directed some music videos and the charming rom-com "(500) Days Of Summer." And the next thing he knew, he was caught in the web of "The Amazing Spider-Man," directing two films of the franchise so far, and recently confirmed for the third. But it looks like he's getting an exit strategy together. Fox has snapped up the rights to the upcoming book "Cold Comfort (aka How To Catch A Russian Spy)" co-written by journalist Ellis Henican, with the material being developed for Webb to direct. The comedy, which is said to have a lead role perfect for a Jonah Hill type, tells the story of a self-taught spy who works with the FBI to track down a Russian agent in the United States. Sounds cool bro, but with Webb tied up through 2016 with Spidey, this is a long way off. [Deadline] Polish filmmaking...

With award season coming fast around the corner, the Chicago International Film Festival has recently revealed their full lineup, which includes a very enticing mix of well-known and new talents. With the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis closing the fest and Alexander Payne’s Nebraska as its centerpiece, the festival includes focus on “After Dark” features, Lgbtq films in their “Out-Look” category, special presentations (like Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave), and more. Below is the press release that fills in the rest:

The 49Th Chicago International Film Festival Announces Films In Competition

Chicago, Il (September 17, 2013) – The 49th Chicago International Film Festival announced today the full lineup of films selected to screen in the International Feature, New Directors, Docufest, After Dark, Q Hugo, and Short Film Competitions. The competitions feature a diverse mix of established and new filmmakers and genres as well as World, North American and Us premieres. Sixteen...

Chicago – The Chicago International Film Festival revealed their schedule for the 2013 incarnation, which runs from Oct. 10-24, 2013, and it’s their most impressive in years, including new works by Alexander Payne, Joel & Ethan Coen, Steve McQueen, John Wels, Abdellatif Kechiche, Dario Argento, Bill Condon, John McNaughton, Kore-eda Kirokazu, Stephen Frears, Tsai Ming-Liang, Errol Morris, and dozens more.

Nebraska

Photo credit: Paramount Vantage

Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska” will be a centerpiece film and the fest will close with the Coen’s “Inside Llewyn Davis.” Dario Argento will attend with his “Dracula 3D” and Errol Morris and Bruce Dern will both accept achievement awards. Hot off its Toronto Film Festival Award win, “12 Years a Slave” will make its Chicago premiere.

Films in competition are listed below. Stay tuned to HollywoodChicago.com for all the latest news, previews, and interviews for the 2013 Chicago International Film Festival. And go here for the full schedule andto purchase tickets.

His new film Walesa. Man of Hope premieres in Venice.

Venice will present the 2013 Persol prize to Polish director Andrzej Wajda.

The award will be presented on Sept 5, before the out of competition screening of Wajda’s latest film Walesa. Man of Hope.

Wajda’s films include Man of Iron, Ashes And Diamonds, The Promised Land, The Young Girls of Wilko and Katyn.

Venice film festival director Alberto Barbera said: “Wajda is not just the most emblematic director in post-war Polish filmmaking. He is the director who has been capable, in his work (over 50 films in his more than sixty-year career), of raising the most decisive and important questions about the history of his country, and consequently, of Europe in its entirety, inviting us to reflect on the critical relationship between personal experiences and those of an entire nation, between the anguish that often befalls individual destinies and the weight of the collective task they are called...

Introducing our look at the year that defined the modern era, the veteran writer recalls the extraordinary collision of politics, culture and social upheaval that he witnessed as a student

Was it a prefigurative year? I think so. Not that one thought of it as such at the time or even a few years later, when it was totally forgotten in the turbulence that engulfed the world. I am trying to recall that year, to find deep down some memories, even a few impressions on the basis of which I could reconstruct a misted-up past without too many distortions.

When I arrived to study at Oxford in October 1963, the bohemian style was black plastic or leather jackets for women and black leather or navy donkey jackets for men. I stuck to cavalry twills and a duffle coat, at least for a few months. The Cuban missile crisis had temporarily boosted...

Its wide range of contributors and influences make Lore something more than just another tale of post-Nazi Germany

Given its transnational provenance – its Anglo-German source novel adapted by a British-Bengali screenwriter, its Australian director and its bleak Nazi-era subject matter – I'm reluctant to dub Lore a straightforwardly German movie. This might seem counterintuitive given its story: a 14-year-old German daughter of prominent Nazis is left to trek northwards across a ruined Germany in the weeks after the Nazi collapse, her infant siblings and a displaced Jewish boy in tow, and her Nazi assumptions slowly unravelling.

That bald summary might induce one to categorise Lore in the long and honourable line of movies set against the death-seizures of Hitler's regime. That line stretched from Rossellini's Germany Year Zero, shot contemporaneously in 1947 in the actual smoking ruins, to 2008's Anonyma, in which sexual servitude is seen as one woman's only sane response...

Andrei Tarkovsky doesn't exactly have the largest filmography, but it's a well respected one that I am only beginning to explore. I've seen Solaris and his final film The Sacrifice, but haven't yet taken the time to explore such highly regarded films as Andrei Rublev and Stalker. With so few feature films to his credit, you'd think it would be easy to see them all, but considering the two I just mentioned clock in at over 160 minutes each (205 for Rublev) I want to be sure I watch them uninterrupted once I give them the chance. This brings me to Criterion's latest Blu-ray presentation of Tarkovsky's feature film debut, Ivan's Childhood, and while watching, three things came immediately to mind, 1.) Ingmar Bergman, 2.) Robert Rossellini's Germany Year Zero and 3.) the mixture of religious imagery and destruction as seen in Ashes and Diamonds. When it comes to Bergman, the visual comparisons are obvious,...

Taxi Driver, North by Northwest, The Manchurian Candidate, JFK – there's a rich history of assassinations in American film. But what's the difference between the accidental killer and the glamorously rebellious hitman?

It was Monday 31 March 1981, coming up to 2.30pm, and John Hinckley was fidgeting by the Florida Avenue entrance of the Washington Hilton, catching the attention of a police lieutenant who stopped to stare over at him. Hinckley jostled with reporters too, complaining that the press were always getting in the way, before finding a place to stand among the TV cameras. It drizzled, off and on, and the sidewalk was damp. His speech inside finished, President Reagan came out of the hotel, flanked by security men, acknowledging the few onlookers across the street and the small crowd of pressmen on the sidewalk beside him. For a moment, Hinckley asked himself the question: "Should I do this or not?" A journalist shouted to the president,...

I was a sceptic; I thought it could not be done. I did not believe that London could host such an important global event, let alone pull it off with such grandiose confidence. But now the Olympics are over and to be honest, I don’t want it to end. Particularly considering my last images may be that of Jessie J ruining Queen, or Liam Gallagher proving he needs Noel. But with Britain standing 3rd in the medal rankings, we can be proud of our athletes’ efforts. Whether it was handball, hockey or dressage, my eyes were opened to the magic of the Olympics and I’m sad to see them go. So why not cling on for a little bit longer and join me as I attempt to blur the realms of Film and the Summer Olympics.

If you haven’t read my previous parts, then please find them...

During the first week of August, Sight & Sound organized a poll that dethroned "Citizen Kane" as the best movie ever made. Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" took the title as the Greatest Film ending "Citizen Kane's" long run. (See Dethroned! "Citizen Kane" No Longer Best Movie Ever! Critics, Directors Pick Top 10 Films of All Time!)

Academians, archivists, critics, directors, and distributors all over the world were among the ones invited to participate in the poll. Now, Sight & Sound has revealed the choices made by our favorite directors (via Collider). Here they are (it's interesting to note that among the list of directors below, only Martin Scorsese, David O'Russell, and Sam Mendes picked "Vertigo"):

Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James, Killing Them Softly)

Apocalypse Now (1979) . Francis Ford Coppola

Badlands (1973) . Terrence Malick

Barry Lyndon (1975) . Stanley Kubrick

Blue Velvet (1986) . David Lynch

Marnie (1964) . Alfred Hitchcock

Mulholland Dr. (2003) . David Lynch

The Night of the Hunter...