51st Krakow Film Festival is due to begin next week. Besides the competing and premiere films, the audience will also have an opportunity to watch the films of “Festivals Laureates” and “Somewhere in Europe” sections, which have already gained viewers' love and jurors' acclaim.

Krakow Film Festival's category of “Festival Awards Winners” is being created on the basis of the cooperation with other festivals focusing on documentary and short films, such as IDFA in Amsterdam, HotDocs in Toronto, DocLisboa in Lisbon, Dok Leipzig and Uppsala Kortfilmfestival.

- Apart from exchanging experiences, the cooperation with foreign festivals is also a valuable source of reciprocal inspiration – says Barbara Orlicz-Szczypuła, vice-president of the Krakow Film Foundation, the Festival's organiser. - We bring interesting films from abroad to Krakow, and, at the same time, by conducting projects such as Polish Docs and Polish Shorts we are perceived as the ambassadors of Polish cinema.

This year 8 thematically diverse films are included in the cycle which presents the laurels' winners. Among them is an ascetic, but metaphoric animation “Sleep”, Jerzy Śladkowski's film about a female worker from a vodka factory, who dreams of a career in faraway Moscow, and a moving prison confession of an American persecuted for numerous rapes on his Filipino wives and mistresses. The cycle also includes a musical comedy about dying, namely a unique premortal performance of Carla Zilbersmith's, a sharp-tongued artist diagnosed with a terminal disease.

Two films take place in the emigrant milieu – Portugese “Li Ké Terra” depicts the dilemmas of the young emigrants from the Republic of Cape Verde, whose parents did not apply for the legalisation of their stay, thus jeopardising the boys' future; Israeli “Jeremiah” is a rather bitter story about the Tel Aviv-based emigrants from the former Soviet Union. Marta Minorowicz's “A Piece of Summer”, on the other hand, is a repeatedly awarded story of making the attempt to rebuild the bond between a grandfather and a grandson in the harsh scenery of the Bieszczady mountains' nature.

Category “Somewhere in Europe” concentrates on more intimate themes, which are linked together by the place in which the action happens – small, often forgotten villages, far away from the neon lights and the noise of the modern European metropolias.

“The Revenge” and “My Father Evgeni” touch upon the relations between father and son. Whereas the first story revolves around the family secret, the second one describes family affairs against the backdrop of Communist Ukraine. The protagonists of Estonian-Ukrainian “Pit no. 8” and Russian “Miner’s Day” are the victims of economic and social changes that swept through Europe over the last 20 years, which gradually dragged the mining industry down, often a source of income for whole regions. “Almost Married” and “Village Without Women” takes upon the issue of search for lifetime partners and marriage. Turkish woman from an orthodox family returns home, and introduces her individually chosen fiancé to her authoritarian father, and three Janković brothers - Dragan, Zoran, and Rodoljub are looking for Albanian women who will agree to marry them and settle in Serbian village Zabrdhe. The section closes with “The Whole World is a Narrow Bridge” - the intimate story of the Slovakian Jews community based upon the photographic memorabilia revolves around Ján Mozolák, who saved from Holocaust the lives of 14 Jews during the WWII.
It is worth mentioning that 5 out of 7 films of the cycle were co-produced not only by the Western European countries such as France and Italy, but also by the U.S. and Israel. The intimate, seemingly hermetical stories from Eastern and Central-Eastern Europe easily cross the borders and find audiences in various corners of the world.

The detailed descriptions of the films from the two categories, and the screenings timetable can be found on the website: www.krakowfilmfestival.pl

Krakow Film Festival begins on 23rd May, the festival passes and the tickets for individual screenings are available in the box-offices of the festival cinemas from today. The passes which allows to see all the films costs 120 PLN (70 PLN concession), the season ticket for one cycle is 40 PLN, one-day ticket – 40 PLN, the single ticket for the screenings before 5 p.m. - 5 PLN, after 5 p.m. - 10 PLN.