This is WESA Arts, a weekly newsletter by Bill O'Driscoll providing in-depth reporting about the Pittsburgh area art scene. Sign up here to get it every Wednesday afternoon.
Though it was overshadowed last week by the awful events in the Middle East, the news from Poland was as encouraging as it was surprising: In national elections, the center-right Civic Platform and two likely coalition partners outpolled the ruling Law and Justice Party, a nationalist, socially conservative outfit whose continued dominance many observers saw as a threat to democracy there.
There’s nothing partisan about Pittsburgh’s long-running Polish Film Festival, but the big election seems a good reason to catch up with films both old and new from that country’s rich cinematic tradition.
The festival is run by the Polish Cultural Council, a nonprofit whose executive director, Maria Staszkiewicz, previously guided the showcase as part of the Three Rivers Film Festival.
Staszkiewicz, who took the film festival solo last year, is a native of Poland who has lived in Pittsburgh since 1988. (Foodies will enjoy knowing that she is the mother of Thomas Skowronski, co-owner of Pittsburgh’s James Beard-nominated Apteka restaurant.)
The 2023 festival runs Thu., Oct. 26-Nov. 4, with two distinct components: a retrospective for an iconic filmmaker and a slate of new films, all screened either at the Harris Theater or Row House Cinema.
This year’s retrospective celebrates Jerzy Skolimowski, who directed his first film in 1960 and who is still active at age 85. Last year, he garnered critical acclaim for his feature “Eo,” a deeply moving film whose hero is a donkey.
“He’s tremendous, and I think some of his films really deserve a second look,” said Staszkiewicz.
The fest’s five Skolimowksi features span from his earliest, made behind the Iron Curtain, to one of his newest. They include the semi-autobiographical “Walkover” (1965), in which Skolimowksi himself portrays an amateur boxer in a relationship with a young woman who manages a power plant. “The Shout,” made in England in 1978 and starring Susannah York, Alan Bates and John Hurt, was that rare horror film to win a top prize at Cannes. And in 2015’s “11 Minutes,” Skolimowski deconstructs Hollywood action films by cutting back and forth between a variety of characters in contemporary Warsaw living through the same brief span of time.
The six brand-new features in the festival include “Filip,” Michael Kwieciński’s World War II drama about a Polish Jew posing as a French waiter in occupied Paris, and “The Secret of Little Rose,” Jan Kidawa-Bloński’s thriller about a politician thrown into turmoil after her husband is killed in a terrorist attack.
Of topical interest is “Green Border,” the latest from Agnieszka Holland, famed director of the 1990 arthouse classic “Europa, Europa.” Her new drama is set amid the recent humanitarian crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border, and involves a Polish psychologist, a family of Syrian refugees, an English teacher from Afghanistan, and a border guard.
Staszkiewicz notes that the issues “Green Border” addresses aren’t unique to Poland. “Similar problems face this country and France and Greece and Italy,” she says. She adds it’s about “how to be a human in a situation like this.”
