The Tofifest International Film Festival has announced the complete programme and the names of winners of the honorary Golden Angel Awards, at today’s press conference. They will be awarded to the outstanding actors Daniel Olbrychski and Danuta Szaflarska, and film director Jerzy Hoffman. The festival starts on 18th October and it will include 16 film sections with more than 150 films to be screened during the event. The festival will be accompanied by Audiowizje music festival.
It has become an every year tradition that Tofifest honours outstanding personalities of Polish and European cinema. This year, a Special Angel of Tofifest for Artistic Insolence goes to Daniel Olbrychski (The Deluge, Promised Land, The Birch Wood, and many others), one of the most significant actors in the history of Polish cinema. Geraldine Chaplin and Jiri Menzel are just two of the many who have already received Golden Angel Awards for Lifetime Achievement, at Tofifest IFF. This year, this award goes to Danuta Szaflarska (Aftermath, Time to Die, and Diabły, diabły, and many others) and film director Jerzy Hoffman, author of the film adaptations of the Trilogy by Henryk Sienkiewicz, and a nominee for Academy Awards.
Other festival guests will include, among others, Bohdan Slama, an outstanding Czech director, who will receive a special Golden Angel for his contribution to the development of European cinema. The Variety magazine has listed Sláma as one of the ten international film directors, whose career “is worth keeping an eye on.” He became famous, thanks to Wild Bees, which was awarded at film festivals in Rotterdam, San Francisco, and Warsaw, while his Something like Happiness won seven Czech Lion Awards and the Golden Shell at the San Sebastian IFF). Another of the many guests to the festival will be Ilmaar Raag, one of the best filmmakers from Estonia, author of The Class, which received an honorary mention and a special award at the Karlovy Vary IFF, and two awards at the Warsaw Film Festival.
Films will be assessed by three jury compositions, which will include, among other, the following people: Stefan Kitanov, director of the Sofia International Film Festival, director Tomasz Wasilewski (Floating Skyscrapers), actors Agata Trzebuchowska (Ida), Marcin Kowalczyk (You are God), Olga Bołądź (Flying Pigs, Służby specjalne), as well as film director Robert Wichrowski (The French Trick). Festival guests will also include many film directors and actors appearing in the films competing in contest sections.
Golden Angels, the main awards of the festival, will be awarded in four competitions. ON AIR is the main competition for international debuts and it will include 13 films, among which we will have an opportunity to see The Tribe (awarded in Cannes) from Ukraine, or Kebab & Horoscope from Poland. Many films will have their Polish premières in Torun, including Corn Island from Georgia, which won the Karlovy Vary IFF, or Zero Motivation from Israel, which was nominated for 12 Israeli film awards. The SHORTCUT short film competition will include 33 films from 20 different countries. As for the FROM POLAND Polish film competition, it will include 11 films and such titles, as Parasite or Onirica/Field of Dogs. The LOKALIZACJE competition is dedicated to the films made by filmmakers from the regions of Kujawsko-Pomorskie, and it will include 22 films, among others Milky Brother – the winner of the Young Cinema Competition at the Gdynia Film Festival – and an international project Bydgoszcz from Dusk till Dawn.
The thematic axis of this year’s edition of Tofifest is the Phenomena – Nordic Noir section, i.e. films based on the extremely popular crime fiction novels from Scandinavia. Tofifest will the first Polish festival making an attempt to investigate this genre in cinema, which is being born right in front of our eyes. This is the reason, why our official poster has the face of actress Noomi Rapace, who played Lisbeth Salander in the film adaptations of the Millennium crime fiction trilogy by Stieg Larsson. This section will include an original selection of films, prepared by Kafka Jaworska, director of the festival, among others Headhunters with Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Citizen of the Year with Stellan Skarsgård, or Insomnia by Erik Skjoldbjærg (a remake of the original film by Christopher Nolan under the same title).
The Viva Baltic section will present a selection of films from Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, while the Flanders vs. Wallonia section will make us acquainted with a clash of films from that geographical region. The latter of the two sections will include the Polish premiere of Two Days One Night by the Dardenne brothers, starring Marion Cotillard. There will also be a special section dedicated to Ukraine, which will include The Guide (a Ukrainian candidate for Academy Awards) or I’m Femen about Oksana Shachko, leader of the feminist protest group Femen, who also be a guest to our festival.
Tofifest will also commemorate the 20th anniversary of Francois Truffaut’s death, by presenting a retrospective of his films, including Jules and Jim, 400 Blows, and The Last Metro, one of the last films by this master of cinema. Another interesting section is Three Bs, which is a confrontation of the film work by three film directors from Spain, i.e. Luis Garcia Berlanga, Luis Bunuel, and Juan Antonio Bardem. They were the first filmmakers to oppose the Fascist regime of General Francisco Franco.
The audience of Tofifest is also in for a special treat, which is a new section called Somnambulists, presenting night screenings of films by Jodorowsky, Bunuel, and Lynch. There will also be a screening of Movies from the Heart of Poland, a new initiative undertaken by Tofifest, which is a selection of the 20 most interesting films made by filmmakers from the region of Kujawsko-Pomorskie, in the 21st century. After the festival, this retrospective promoting the region (with Torun and Bydgoszcz included) will have a tour around Europe.
AUDIOWIZJE, an innovative music festival, based on interactions between sound and image, will have its first edition at Tofifest 2014. The motto of Audiowizje is “hear the image, see the sound”. This festival will include two big music and film contests, and a number of accompanying events. As many as 30 young music bands from all around Poland will compete for the main award in the Audiowizje Showcase contest. The winner will be selected by the audience which will select the best musicians and authors of the best concert visualisations. During the Muzyka do nakręcenia (roughly translated as “music to make a video for”) contest, a film crew supervised by director Bogdan Dziworski will make a video clip to the music of the band selected by Internet users. The contest is co-organised by nuplays.pl and tlumtlum.pl websites.
The 12th edition of the Tofifest IFF will take place in Torun, from 18th to 26th October, 2014, at the Od Nowa Academic Centre for Culture and Art and the Centre of Contemporary Art. The Audiowizje Festival will be held from 21st to 25th October 2014, at the Tofifest Festival Centre, and in 5 music clubs in the Old Town in Torun.