POLISH SHORT FILMS AWARDED IN ZLÍN

The 62. International Film Festival for Children and Youth in Zlín has just ended. Two Polish productions came back with awards – Milena Dutkowska's short fiction film The Hero and Piotr Kaźmierczak's The Hole.

The Zlín Film Festival was founded in 1961 in Czechoslovakia and for years has functioned as the International Film Festival for Children and Youth.  Thanks to its extremely rich program, the young and older alike can watch animated films, documentaries, and features. An important part of the festival is also the meeting of cinema and literature, i.e. screenings of film adaptations of comic books, school mandatory reading books, and classics.

The Jury Award in the category of animated film went to Piotr Kaźmierczak's The Hole. The awarded film is a short story about struggling with emptiness and loneliness.

In turn, Milena Dutkowska's film received the Jury Award for the best short fiction film. The protagonist of The Hero is 10-year-old Cyprian – an orphan raised by his beloved grandmother, who dreams of becoming a real hero. When his grandmother dies, the threat of being sent to an orphanage starts looming over Cyprian. Now he will have to confront real loss and what it means to be a hero in the face of suffering.

The list of winners can be found here.