What’s in SPEKTRUM? First titles announced!

This year, SPEKTRUM – the festival’s longest-running section – will feature six feature-length films, four of which have yet to receive a theatrical release in Poland. The international line-up includes three standout titles from this year’s New Horizons, while the Polish selection brings together three productions, among them the winner of the Polish Competition at Millennium Docs Against Gravity and Piotr Domalewski’s latest film, telling the love story of Grażyna and Jacek Kuroń.

NEW HORIZONS HIGHLIGHTS

Among this year’s New Horizons highlights is Lance Hammer’s Queen at Sea, starring Juliette Binoche, Anna Calder-Marshall and Tom Courtenay. The film explores love and care in a way that quickly transforms an apparently private story into a difficult moral dilemma about autonomy, dignity and the limits of making decisions on another person’s behalf. Calder-Marshall and Courtenay both received Silver Bears in Berlin for their performances.

Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved follows a world-renowned Spanish director – played by a magnetic Javier Bardem – who returns home to make his most ambitious film yet. He casts his own daughter (Victoria Luengo), with whom he has long had a strained relationship, in one of the leading roles. Their work on set soon turns into a confrontation with the family’s past.

The third international title is All of a Sudden by legendary filmmaker Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, director of Drive My Car, which screened at SPEKTRUM in 2023. Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto received the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for their performances. The film follows the encounter between the director of a Paris care home and a Japanese theatre director living with cancer. What begins as a chance meeting develops into a relationship that allows both women to see their lives from a new perspective.

POLISH CINEMA

The Polish part of the section opens with Maciej Cuske’s documentary Candidates of Death, winner of the Polish Competition and two Audience Awards at Millennium Docs Against Gravity. Over the course of more than a decade, Cuske spent his summer holidays making B-movie horrors with his son and his son’s friends. The result is an exceptionally tender chronicle of growing up, friendship and the bond between father and son – a film that has been described as a “documentary Boyhood.”

Also in the programme is The Assistant, directed by Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal and starring Piotr Trojan, Agnieszka Żulewska and Andrzej Konopka. An adaptation of Robert Walser’s novel, the film follows Joseph Marti, who, after leaving his job at a bookbinding workshop, arrives at an early-20th-century villa and gradually becomes a man of all work. His growing subordination and loss of freedom reveal the mechanisms through which work can humiliate and strip a person of autonomy – mechanisms that, despite the changing times, remain strikingly relevant.

The SPEKTRUM section will close with Piotr Domalewski’s Nasza rewolucja, starring Magdalena Popławska and Arkadiusz Jakubik as Grażyna and Jacek Kuroń. It is the story of a great love intertwined with opposition activism, imprisonment and the experience of martial law. The film will screen at SPEKTRUM ahead of its Polish theatrical release.