KINOTEKA Polish Film Festival Presents 2 Upcoming Animation Events
Polish off your Polish and take note of two upcoming events in the calendar for those interested in animation, gaming and/or art-rock sextets. KINOTEKA is London’s annual Polish (not polish) film festival in its 15th year and spread across a range of capital venues.
First up on the 30th March at the BFI Southbank is a masterclass with Tomasz Bagiński, who won the BAFTA with Best Short Animation in 2006 for his stunning film Fallen Art. It’s an extraordinary work; funny, dark, poetic and challenging at the same time, as well as being about animation itself.
Bagiński was destined to be a forerunner of Polish new media ever since he made his first film The Hunt at the maths department of Warsaw University where his father worked. Enrolling at the film school in Łódź only to find that he was ahead of their curve, and enrolling again in an architecture course while teaching himself computer animation in his spare time, Bagiński’s film The Cathedral (2002) was nominated for an Oscar for Best Short Animated Film.
Tomasz continued to make shorts, commercials and promos and has becoming increasingly involved in directing hybrid media, operating in an arena that encompasses cinema, gaming and VFX. He is currently directing a feature film based on the Witcher 3 video game.
The event should be particularly interesting to those who are already working across different platforms, or are thinking about exploring new forms of media to see what their animation skills can bring to them, and vice versa. He will be in conversation with the writer and broadcaster Danny Leigh.
Ending the festival is a Closing Night Gala at the Barbican worth sacrificing a limb to be at. This is where the art-rock sextet bit comes in, as British Sea Power will be performing a specially commissioned live score to a selection of classic Polish animated shorts selected by the band.
The films listed on the website seem an intriguing and canny choice, showcasing a wide variety of techniques: Zbigniew Rybczyński’s Oscar-winning optical marvel Tango (1980), Zofia Oraczewska’s cut-out classic Banquet (1976), Walerian Borowczyk’s photo-montage pixilation The School (1958) and Piotr Dumała’s deceptively simple adult fairy tale Little Black Riding Hood (1983). And hey, if you don’t like one of them close your eyes and listen to what is the favourite band of “Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Radcliffe and Peter Capaldi”.
Other non-animated highlights at the festival including a retrospective of Andrzej Wajda (a favourite filmmaker of the blond bloke out of Steps, Fatima Whitbread, half of ZZ Top and me) whose evolving body of work was constantly engaging with the remarkable developments of Polish history in the late 20th century. His war trilogy is also screening at the Barbican.