Krystyna Krauze lands top prize at Polish documentary film festival

The documentary won the “Golden Resistor” award of the 9th “Defiant, Unvanquished, Enduring” Film Festival, which closed in the northern city of Gdynia on Saturday.

The annual festival celebrates the country’s postwar anti-communist resistance heroes and its struggle for freedom from 1939 to 1989.

Krauze, who was among a long list of prizewinners, collected the award from Culture and National Heritage Minister Piotr Gliński at a high-profile ceremony at the city’s Musical Theatre that also featured a message from President Andrzej Duda.

"By recalling and documenting the history of the Polish people’s struggle for freedom, filmmakers pay tribute to the heroes of the sovereign Republic of Poland and shape our collective memory of the past," Duda wrote in the message, which was delivered by his minister Wojciech Kolarski.

“But above all, they build in us who live in contemporary times, a sense of national pride, patriotic spirit and a will to cement the country’s independence,” added Duda, who lent his name to this year's event.

Brother Karel is a documentary biopic about iconic Czechoslovakian poet and singer-songwriter Karel Kryl (1944-1994), whose protest songs exposed the hypocrisy and inhumanity of the communist regime in his home country. A key focus of the film is the story of a song Kryl wrote inspired by bloodily suppressed anti-communist protests in Poland in December 1970. (gs/pk)

Source: PAP