Five Women Directors Discuss their Art and Craft at the New Horizons Film Festival2 min read

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On the fourth anniversary of Amy Winehouse’s death, I was watching the opening night screening of Amy at the New Horizons Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, another documentary about a legendary musician who died at the age of twenty-seven, was also slated in the New Horizons program. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the controversial German filmmaker who made over 40 films before his death at thirty-seven years old, was the subject of Fassbinder, a documentary also screening in Wroclaw. The Actress, a documentary about the Polish movie star Elżbieta Czyżewska, who fled from communist Warsaw to New York and died only five years ago at age 72, premiered in the New Polish Cinema section of the festival. New Horizons Film Festival, celebrating its tenth edition, programmed over 340 films from 54 countries this year. It wasn’t until I saw Son of Saul, the Hungarian Holocaust horror film directed by László Nemes that won the Grand Prix at Cannes earlier this summer, that the cumulative effect of many of these stories hit home.

As Son of Saul”˜s credits rolled, I walked out of the packed cinema and into the afternoon sun of Wroclaw, a colorful city with one of the largest and most beautiful market squares in Europe. While everyone around me enjoyed an ice cream from one of the surrounding polish “lody” shops, a miniature bronze gnome caught my eye. Hundreds of these dwarf figures dwell throughout the streets and in the corners of Wroclaw to commemorate the Orange Alternative political movement against communism in the 1980s. Each dwarf, a symbol of the movement, is unique and engaged in a different activity or position. The figurine I discovered after the Son of Saul screening was straddled atop two film reels of an old camera.

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