The Krakow Film Festival Has Taken Stock

“The Golden Buttons” a documentary work of Alex Evstigneev, was awarded twice by the jury of the international short film contest. The first is a Silver Dragon Award for the best director work in non-live action films (as well as a cash prize). It gives an opportunity for the film to apply for Oscar because the Krakow Festival (one of the two in Poland) has qualifications to recommend short films to the Academy. By the way, The Silver Dragon Award for the best director work in the animated genre also received a russian director — Konstantin Bronzit for his “We Сan’t Live Without Cosmos”.

Evstigneev's second award is for the Best European film, which automatically made him the European Film Awards (EFA) nominee in a “short film” category. Each of 24 festivals with EFA qualification proposes a candidate for the awards. After that during the voting a short list is formed. It contains 5 pictures that experts choose between to announce the winner.

This year the chairman of the short film competition is Jan Komasa, one of the most prominent polish filmmakers of the present, whose works hit Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto, Rotterdam and other big festivals. Last year his “Corpus Christi” was nominated for Oscar as the best foreign language film from Poland.

The Krakow’s Festival management has kept all competitive programs and business sessions. Screenings of festival films were available just for the residents of Poland. This year over 39 pictures out of 400 were selected for the short film competition. It’s an adjacent section for documentary, live-action and animated pictures with 13 works for each of them. Industrial program was also busy. In addition to several pitches for the polish documentary films, there was organised a film market CEDOC, aimed at Central Europe. Also traditional meetings of members choosing nominees for large festivals (Berlinale, Sundance, Venice, Hot Docs, IDFA) were held. 

In May “The Golden Buttons” participated in the Opening  Scenes, a students film section in Visions du Réel where it got the prize from IDFA. Visions du Réel, one of the most relevant global festivals of documentaries, was also organised online.