Foreword

Dear cinema lovers, 

 

it is the tenth time now that Szczecin hosts the transfrontier film festival.

 

Szczecin European Film Festival crosses formal borders: today the possibilities of perceiving reality through picture and sound – not only in “documentary film” – are opening intriguing narrative perspectives for filmmaking. They also enable us to continuously discover reality anew.

 

This aspect is present in many of the 40 productions from 22 countries, which are presented in the European and Polish competitions. Those films have been chosen from among 1,750 proposals that we had received – so far this response is exceptional in the history of the festival.

 

The “Boundaries of Cinema” program also focuses on tracing the trends and potential directions in which film art may develop.

 

The accompanying program is truly rich this year: in six extensive program blocks, presenting about 150 films altogether, there will be purely entertainment-oriented cinema from the end of the 19th century, which simultaneously faithfully portrays reality, as well as the retrospective of Józef Robakowski, one of the first video artists, whose creative output strongly influences the connection between film and visual arts up to this day.

 

The festival also permanently crosses the Polish-German border. For a decade now a two-national organising team and mutual presentations of regional productions, festivals, and forums have been constituting the trademark of our undertaking. The crossing of boundaries also moves us in the form of a burning political issue for modern Europe.

 

We have, therefore, once again found films that cross multiple boundaries: ones which are formal-aesthetic, geographical, mental, socio-political, intellectual, and sensual.

 

For the autumn of film in Szczecin 2015 we wish you compelling discoveries on the borderland!

 

Claudia Dietrich and Bartosz Wójcik 

Polish-German management of the festival