Polish directors featured at Toronto film festival

Andrzej Wajda’s latest film “Afterimage” (“Powidoki”), has been decribed by the festival’s organisers as a “passionate biopic about avant-garde artist Władysław Strzemiński (brilliantly played by Polish superstar Bogusław Linda), who battled Stalinist orthodoxy and his own physical impairments to advance his progressive ideas about art.”

The movie will be screened as a part of the festival’s prestigious “Masters” section, which includes works by the influential art-house filmmakers, alongside movies by Wim Wenders and Pedro Almodóvar.

The festival organisers have described Ryszard Bugajski’s “Zaćma: Blindness”, as a “compelling and forceful look back at the Iron Curtain's collapse”.

They said that the film is about “a woman seeking an audience with the Primate of Poland, the country's top Catholic cardinal”. The fact that the woman in question is a former ruthless Communist Party official adds another element to the narrative.

Meanwhile, “Marie Curie, The Courage of Knowledge”, by Marie Noëlle, a biography of the legendary Polish Nobel Prize–winning physicist and chemist Maria Skłodowska-Curie, will also premiere during the festival.

The main protagonist in the film is played by the Polish actress Karolina Gruszka.

The Toronto International Film Festival is one of the most prominent cinematic events in the world, particularly known for generating "Oscar buzz".

TIME magazine wrote that the festival has recently “grown from its place as the most influential fall film festival to the most influential film festival, period.”

(tf/pk)