THE FILMS BY THE STUDENTS OF THE NATIONAL FILM SCHOOL AWARDED IN SLOVAKIA
At the BARBAKAN festival in Slovakian Banská Bystrica, which ended last weekend, the students of the Łódź film school won unanimously in the short film competition.
The BARBAKAN festival, held since 1994, is one of the oldest Slovakian festivals. The event, which was initially dedicated only to music, slowly evolved into one oriented towards presenting various kinds of audiovisual and fine arts. Every year, the most interesting works by European artists find their way into the festival's programme.At present, the film screenings are the richest festival section. On the last day of the festival, the Grand Prix was given to "Without snow" by Magnus von Horn. It is already the third Grand Prix which the film received, after the ones from Bilbao and Leuven. Lava Films is the coproducer of the graduation film by von Horn. In the same competition, Paweł Zieliński got the audience's award for his feature etude. "Swedish job", which had already been awarded in Slovakia at Artfilm Festival, is based on the true story about the spectacular theft of the lettering "Arbeit macht frei" from the Auschwitz concentration camp.
This year, as many as six Polish films went to the short films programme. Apart from the aforementioned "Without snow" by Magnus von Horn and "Swedish job" by Paweł Ziemilski, the following films were also shown in Banská Bystrica: "Frozen stories" by Grzegorz Jaroszuk, "Żaklina" by Marcin Szuwarowski as well as "Magnet man" and "Telephone" shown together with the full-length "Christening" within the frames of a review of Marcin Wrona's works.
In the full-length films section, apart from aforementioned "Christening" by Marcin Wrona, "Rose" by Wojciech Smarzowski and "Elles" by Małgorzata Szumowska met.
More about the festival on its official website