THREE POLISH PRODUCTIONS AWARDED AT GOEAST
The award for Best Documentary went to Everything Needs to Live by Andriy Lytvynenko and Tetiana Dorodnitsyna; the FIPRESCI International Film Critic’s Award was given to Tomasz Wolski’s A Year in the Life of a Country; and the RhineMain Short Film Award was collected by Zuza Banasińska for Grandmamauntsistercat.
goEast is a German film festival held annually in Frankfurt am Main and Wiesbaden. It focuses on cinema from Central and Eastern Europe, showcasing fiction, documentary and experimental films. The festival promotes intercultural dialogue and engages with the region’s pressing social, historical, and political issues. goEast also serves as an industry hub, offering an array of workshops, pitching sessions, and networking events.
Everything Needs To Live shows the extraordinary daily life of Anna Kurkurina, a charismatic athlete, “the strongest woman in the world”, an animal rights activist, and a lesbian. From a young age, Anna has demonstrated a unique bond with animals. She taught biology at a school, worked at a local zoo where she befriended a lion, helped establish animal shelters, and found new homes for dozens of stray animals.
After turning forty, she decided to start a career in powerlifting and soon climbed to the top, winning the world championship three times. She also began working as a trainer for young people with disabilities. Since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, leveraging her popularity in the sports world and as an influencer, Anna has continued to help injured and abandoned animals, following her motto: “He who saves one life saves the whole world”.
The period that descended upon communist Poland after 13 December 1981 is known as the “long night of martial law”. Yet this era of state terror, aimed at suppressing the Solidarity movement, had multiple faces. Using solely archival footage, including both familiar and lesser-known material, A Year in the Life of a Country peers behind the veil of these events. To the rhythm of military drums, it portrays daily life alongside propaganda and military operations, juxtaposing sounds of the streets, demonstrations, riots, and carnival celebrations. In doing so, it challenges the mythologised image of Polish society as merely victims of the system.
The film was created using materials from the Educational Film Studio [Wytwórnia Filmów Oświatowych]. Grandmamauntsistercat tells the story of a matriarchal family, seen through the eyes of a child grappling with a propaganda-laden reality full of ideological slogans. The footage was originally created as educational and propaganda tools in communist Poland but were transformed for the film, becoming a kind of centre for autobiographical memories.
You can find out more about the festival here.