Film Programme
17 - 26 OCT 2020
Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Warsaw, PL (& Online in Select Territories)
The motto of this year's festival serves as a pretext to rediscover the world of science fiction cinema and think about how filmmakers imagined the future in the mid-20th century. To this end, we will revisit a select few examples of Polish sci-fi cinema.
The first Polish sci-fi films are not just dystopian visions, but also short television productions, such as Andrzej Wajda's only comedy about transplants, Stanisław Kokesz's short feature about a mad scientist, and Janusz Kubik's story about aliens. The Polish Radio Experimental Studio also played a vital role in creating an image of the future by using sounds to build new worlds.
Combining these rather obscure cinematographic works with contemporary productions, in particular works created by artists from Poland and beyond – in the meantime, the debate about our future has moved from the cinema into the sphere of visual arts – helps look at these films from a broader perspective, in the context of the most burning present-day problems and how they were tackled before. It turns out that there is a certain continuity to cinematographic struggles with the future. Visions of the climate catastrophe appear both in contemporary works and dystopias from the late 20th century. Artworks that take anthropocene, the climate crisis and ways to avert it as their subject matter are in fact immersed in the philosophical tradition of the often low-budget Polish sci-fi cinema.
The programme also includes foreign productions that expand our understanding of changes in the digital world and in the relationship between people and nature.
Curated by Joseph Cutts, Anna Winkler (Adam Mickiewicz Institute) & Michał Matuszewski (Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art) as part of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute's Digital Cultures: Imagine Futures festival
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e-flux Announcement here
Film still - 'The Fish' (2017)