Warsaw Jewish Film Festival Shorts: Intimate Polish Stories (PL / EN)

29.06.2022 - 20:00 / High Synagogue, ul. Józefa 38, Kraków (basement hall)

Warsaw Jewish Film Festival Shorts: Intimate Polish Stories – PL, subtitles: EN

• “Love Story”, dir. Rafał Bryll, Poland 2021, 38′
The love story of a Jewish girl and a Pole during World War II. Romantic moments, the hell of war and chilling events. Bogdan Jastrzębski, a Righteous Among the Nations, returns to the times of the war, when he fell in love with his one and only, a Jewish girl named Krystyna Geisler. First-dates, shy kisses, the drama of the Jews in the Częstochowa ghetto, and a daring rescue action on the streets of Częstochowa under the watchful eye of the Germans that was the only way to save the life of his beloved. And then they lived happily ever after.

• “Towards the Light”, dir. Beata Hyży-Czołpińska, Poland 2020, 27′
Joanna, raised as an Orthodox Christian by her grandmother, graduates from a university in London and returns to the small Polish town where she was born. Knowing it would be an “intellectual desert”, she is at the same time driven by desire to search for the truth. She has been studying the history of the borderlands, her hometown and the people who lived there. Her life is a struggle as she is unable to hold onto employment at the local school or community center. Volunteering with young people, she lives between the two worlds: the present, where she still searches for her own identity, and the bygone, erased world of Krynki’s Jewish past.

• “Summer 43”, dir. Aneta Bussold, Poland 2020, 27′
Summer 1943 in a Polish village. Pregnant Zosia and her mother hide a Jewish woman, Zosia’s friend. The situation becomes more complicated when the baby is born. Will friendship and humanity be saved in a life-or-death situation? A story based on real events.

• “Jacek Sroka. The Abyss of Działoszyce”, dir. Jarosław Migoń, Poland 2020, 11′
History and art intertwine. Jacek Sroka talks about his painting “The Abyss of Działoszyce.” The artist’s moving confession goes from the emotions that touched him as a child years ago, to the artistic imperative he realized several decades later. The extermination of Jewish Działoszyce preserved in memory and in art. A reflection on the tragedy of a terrible time.

“The Space of an Image: A Series of Films on Jewish Topics”
Partner: Warsaw Jewish Film Festival, Camera of David Foundation