AWARDEE OF MERIT: Polish actress Elzbieta Czyżewska speaks after accepting the Polish Ministry of Culture Award of Merit.
Jan Jekielek

NEW YORK — The first annual New York Polish Film Festival opened to a nearly full house at the Manhattan Director’s Guild Theater last Thursday evening. “I’m so glad to see so many faces, because it shows us that our work makes sense. Hopefully it will happen every year,” said Hanna Hartowicz, festival director.

The festival is a celebration of film “that’s always been inherently political,” according to Dr. Annette Insdorf, professor of film at Columbia University, and longtime advocate of Polish cinema. Festival organizers put together a unique selection of titles that is largely centered around independent film.

“I don’t think that Polish cinema right now is in very good condition. There are only a handful of [good] directors,” said Kasia Mazurkiewicz, festival coordinator. With this in mind, the festival production team sought to avoid most contemporary commercial Polish cinema, focusing instead on new original films as well as some old classics.

“We don’t want to show these movies to Polish people only, they already know about them,” added Mazurkiewicz, explaining why at least a third of the films are classics, some dating back to as early as 1950. Mazurkiewicz believes that certain older masterpieces deserve to reach a broader audience, since they have had little screen time in North America.

To appreciate Polish cinema prior to the Iron Curtain being lifted, one must take into account that all media at the time were under the close scrutiny of censors. Despite this, directors such as Andrzej Wajda, who has two films showcased at the festival, managed to get some surprising messages across.

“Filmmakers had to use double layers of meaning to get around the censors. Usually the intellectuals were smarter than the censors,” said Iwona Eckert-Hamilton, Polish immigrant and staunch festival supporter.

Fittingly, the festival features a retrospective of the Polish legend Elzbieta Czyżewska, who starred in many such intelligently subversive films. Her life itself reads like a screen drama.

Czyżewska was a feisty young actress at the height of her career in the1960’s when her American husband, a New York Times journalist, was expelled from Poland for criticizing the regime’s anti-Semitic policies. Czyżewska was branded a traitor and went into exile in New York—her name so disgraced that it was erased from her films’ credits. In New York, she divorced Halberstam and never found a deserving place in the American movie industry.

Nonetheless, in recognition for her “wonderful contribution to contemporary Polish culture,” Poland’s New York Consul General, Agnieszka Magdziak-Miszewska, presented Czyżewska with the state’s highest culture award, the Award of Merit, at the opening gala.

Five Czyzewska classics are being screened at the festival: “Unloved” (1965), “Wife for an Austrian” (1963), “Where is the General” (1963), “The Saragossa Manuscript” (1964), and “Everything for Sale” (1968).

A powerful new film showcased on opening night was the Hanna Polak and Andrzej Celinski Oscar-nominated film, “Children of Leningradsky.” It is a compassionate and troubling documentary short about the plight of an estimated 4 million children abandoned to the streets in post-Communist Russia. In the film, the children candidly share their world of drug addiction, prostitution, violence and despair. More than just a powerful piece of cinema, Polak hopes the film will raise enough awareness and money to establish a hostel and rehabilitative programs for the children.

“Hopefully the success of the film will be the children’s success too,” said Polak.

Other festival highlights include Oscar-nominated Agnieszka Holland’s new film, “Julia Walking Home (The Healer),” a love story about a Russian faith healer.

The festival continues until May 11 at the Anthology Film Archives. Visit www.polishculture-nyc.org/pci.htm for details.