25-10-2007

Student movie festival launches in Warsaw

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    Only a couple of days after the closing of the Warsaw International Film Fest, the capital is hosting another movie event. The Worldwide Festival of Student Movies, called Young Frames, is a full retrospective on what film industry debutants seek to show to the world

    During three days of screenings that started Thursday (Oct. 25), the audience will have free access to new films from the US, Canada, Germany, the UK, Spain, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Turkey, China, India, Israel and Poland.

    Festival coordinator Sylwia Kujawska said of 199 submitted films, 79 were selected, "so the bar was placed pretty high."

    This is the second edition of the festival, which is a project of the Polish Cinema Art Foundation - a group that professes it's tired of the general state of Polish filmmaking and the distribution industry, and is trying to introduce new ways of both promoting and supporting all kinds of art related with audiovisual techniques.

    Young Frames (Mlode Kadry) is the brainchild of Witold Kona, the chairman of Cinema Art, who sought to create a student film festival for the Polish audience.

    "It was and is our main goal to show the diversity in creating the most recent film art by presenting the achievements of different film schools," said Kujawska.

    Apart from introducing new filmmakers, Young Frames introduces them to the market. "By inviting not only the cinema lovers but also international movie professionals and most importantly distributors, we hope to create a chance for promoting the young directors," Kujawska said. "In most cases this could be their first opportunity to be recognised by the professional movie environment as someone to watch in the future."