Close to 480 films from more than 50 countries are on the programme at this year's 10th Era New Horizons International Film Festival. For the past decade, the Era New Horizons International Film Festival in Wrocław has consistently presented unconventional, original cinema, featuring films that search for a new lexicon, new forms and themes absent from mainstream productions. For years, the festival's film programme has inspired the discovery of new horizons in other areas of art. The events that accompany the festival - exhibitions and installations, spectacles and concerts, lectures and workshops form a comprehensive, interdisciplinary survey across genres.
As part of the "New Horizons" International Competition, the jury will award the Grand Prix for "Best Film", along with 20,000 euro. Films will also compete for an Audience Award and - for the first time this year - the prestigious FIPRESCI prize, awarded by film critics associated with the International Federation of Film Critics.
For the second year in a row, the jury will also award the "Films on Art" International Competition prize of 10,000 euro. In the "New Polish Films" Competition, the best works will receive the Wrocław Film Award, funded by the Mayor of Wrocław (100,000 PLN).
This is also the second ENH festival in which the winners of the competition are guaranteed distribution in Poland by the festival organisers, the New Horizons Association. At the beginning of 2010, the Association released six of the most popular, most acclaimed films from last year's festival: "Hunger", directed by Steve McQueen; "Oxygen" ("Kislorod"), directed by Ivan Vyrypayev; "The Forest" / "Las" by Piotr Dumała; "The Beaches of Agnès" ("Les plages d'Agnès"), directed by Agnès Varda; "Burrowing" directed by Henrik Hellström and Fredrik Wenzel; and "Double Take" directed by Johan Grimonprez, currently showing at cinemas and planned for release on DVD in May this year.
This year's festival will focus on Turkish cinematography, surveying about 30 titles, mainly works of young Turkish cinema recognised at international festivals, along with a retrospective of works by Zeki Demirkubuz, one of the first generation of independent Turkish directors who debuted in the 1990s.
On the 10th anniversary of the death of Wojciech Jerzy Has, one of the greatest visionaries of Polish cinema and world-renowned experimental individualist, a review of his works will grace festival screens. Has's oeuvre will thrive both on screen and in discussion, as well as readings and an exposition prepared specifically for the festival, accompanied by an album.
Another major festival retrospective will be devoted to the artistic father of post-modernism in film, the radical, uncompromising avant-garde artist and co-founder of the French New Wave: Jean-Luc Godard. Godard, who turns eighty this year, is known for his intensive exploration of the aesthetics of cinema, fueled by a passion to deconstruct, to destroy the comfort of naive spectatorship. The retrospective will be supplemented by three publications on the subject of Godard and his cinema.




Polska Organizacja