Wrocław Film Festival

We were lucky enough to be guests at the Wrocław film festival this weekend as Australia was this year's feature country. So we had a great time hob-nobbing with the stars of Poland's stage and screen.

Wrocław is a city in the South West of Poland, just over 5 hours by train from Warsaw. It's a thriving city and has a beautiful 'old' town, which like Warsaw was re-constucted after the war.

The festival was showing 440 feature films(!!) -34 from Australia - during the course of the week, from 45 different countries, with around 100 getting shown for the first time. It was such an exciting time, and we both really got the 'bug' for seeing films and spent Saturday running/waddling ;) between cinemas and seminars.

We managed to catch 6 films, from around the globe, if you're in anyway interested these were: Silver City; God Willing; Alexandra's Project; The Mourning Forest; Playing the Victim and Falling.

One of the highlights for Amy was meeting renowned Australian film critic David Stratton who was one of the special guests at the festival. David had chosen most of the Australian films to be screened and was giving about 3-4 introductory comments at screenings each day. Trevor had to convince Amy not to follow David about to all the films otherwise he would think she was a scary stalker!! It was also great for us to meet a couple of Australian directors and the Polish-Australian actress Gosia Dobrowolska (who is originally from Wroclaw and was also a special guest at the festival - they were showing 11 of her films!)

We were very sad to have to get on the train and come back to Warsaw as we would have loved to have stayed for the whole festival (it runs until 29 July). That way we would have got a good hit of movies - something we probably won't experience for a while once the baby comes along!

However, we do hope to go back to Wrocław for a mini-break with the little one as we didn't really get to do any sightseeing this time around (apart from what we could see dashing from cinema to cinema!)

Amy chooses her next film

The opening scene from Falling (note the two sets of subtitles - how cool are we huh?)

Amy in front of the 'Puppet Theatre' with festival flag