Kinoteka: The Polish Film Festival

Over the last few years the Poles have been pumping money into the arts, partly as a way of branding the country (it works according to their research – many of us are now as likely to think of jazz musicians as plumbers when we think of the country).There was Polska!

Year in 2009/10 – with hundreds of artistic events, setting up international orchestras and, on now, the increasingly adventurous and influential Kinoteka, the Polish Film Festival which runs until the end of the week.

A couple of extraordinary films have already been shown including the UK premiere of Fuck For Forest (on limited release next month), a strange documentary about a bunch of possibly misguided but idealistic nouveaux hippies who set up a porn site, quickly make half a million Euros and put the money into attempting to save the world by buying up a large chunk of the Amazon. This provoked heated discussion after the film, at the Curzon Soho. Can pornography ever be good? Who was exploiting who? Did it even make sense to buy bits of the Amazon? The festival opened with a remastering of the little seen classic Promised Land by Andrzej Wajda, his 1974 Dickensian story of three young men who start a textile factory, an epic, gorgeously shot tale of exploitation, greed and betrayal. 

Still to come in the next few days are a talk by Polanski’s cinematographer Pawel Edelman, a showing of Wiltold Giertz’s extraordinary animated Lascaux cave paintings (with a talk by Giertz), a retrospective of pioneering Polish film and video artist Wojciech Bruszewski and a rare showing of the award-winning 1973 film Illumination by Krzysztof Zanussi, who will be doing a Q&A after the screening. There’s a stunning exhibit of Tomasz Opasinski’s film posters, which finishes on Friday (see image, above) at the Riverside Studios. Kinoteca closes on Sunday night at the Barbican with Andy Votel presents Klexploitation, a surreal homage to Pan Klex, a trilogy of children’s films from the 1980s with live music written by electronic pioneer Andrzej Korzyński. This is a trailer for Unsound 2013, the Kraków festival of innovative music, which will take place for the first time in London later this year.

• More information on Kinoteca

Watch the trailer for Fuck For Forest