TORUN: Joker DoP Lawrence Sher won the Golden Frog in the main competition of the 27th edition of Camerimage, a festival which celebrates the art of cinematography. The Bronze Frog went to the venerated Czech DoP Vladimír Smutný for his work on The Painted Bird directed by Václav Marhoul. The film also won the FIPRESCI Prize. The festival took place 9 – 16 November 2019.

WARSAW: The Polish Film Institute gave 2.7 m PLN / 630,014 EUR in minority international coproduction funding to five international projects.

LODŹ: Oscar winner Roman Polański will be the guest of the closing gala of the 24th European Cinema Forum CINERGIA, despite skipping Venice, where the inclusion of his film An Officer and a Spy in the main competition sparked controversy. Polanski won the Grand Jury Award and FIPRESCI Award in Venice but his wife Emmanuelle Seigner collected the award.

WARSAW: An upcoming drama from Magnus von Horn Sweat was picked up by Jan Naszewski’s Warsaw-based sales outlet New Europe Film Sales, that will manage world sales for the title. It’s the director’s second film after the Cannes Quinzaine-selected The Here After.

International jury in the including Bożena Intrator (USA), Dr Małgorzata Przedpełska-Bieniek, Liliana Komorowska (Canada), Krzysztof Magowski, Janusz Dymek, Piotr Latałło (USA), Romuald Mieczkowski (Lithuania)  chose from 42 films from around the world that qualified for The 7 EMIGRA 2019 and assigned Festival Awards 7 prizes and 6 distinctions. The Jury underlined that after 7 years, EMIGRA had achieved its goal and changed the generation of the creators involved in the competition. This year they were mostly young Poles from abroad who were not yet 30 years old, and their films are searching for their identity, which is inherently associated with discovering their Polish roots.

WARSAW: Discovery and Cyfrowy Polsat have signed a joint venture agreement to create a joint VoD platform that will offer productions of TVN Group, Telewizja Polsat and external entities. The current Player.pl and Ipla.tv held by the companies' platforms will continue to operate.

WARSAW: The 7th EMiGRA Film Festival takes place from 24 to 27 October in Warsaw, organised by the Mazovia Culture Institute. The festival's Artistic Director Agata Lewandowski and Programme Curator Elżbieta Szymańska talked to FNE exclusively about the idea behind this year's edition of this interdisciplinary event combining several art forms depicting Poles living and making films abroad.

WARSAW: A French/Ukrainian documentary about women soldiers, directed by Masha Kondakova, was shown at a special works-in-progress showcase hosted during CentEast Warsaw Market at the 35th Warsaw International Film Festival.

WARSAW: Piotr Chrzan’s new dark comedy Masters of the Planet was presented at a special works-in-progress showcase hosted during the CentEast Warsaw Market at the 35th Warsaw International Film Festival, which concluded on 20 October 2019.

WARSAW: The Grand Prix of the 35th Warsaw Film Festival went to Georgia's Oscar submission Shindisi directed by Dito Tsintsadze at the closing ceremony on 20 October 2019.