Warsaw Film Festival: Polish drama wins Grand Prix

The 42nd Warsaw Film Festival closed on Sunday with a homegrown triumph, as Grzegorz Dębowski's What Belongs to Others (Cudze rzeczy) took the Warsaw Grand Prix in the international competition. The winners were announced at a Saturday-evening awards ceremony that ended a ten-day edition screening 190 titles, with fifteen films in the running for the top prize.

The winning drama follows a burglar who slips into a dead stranger's life by assuming the identity of his late girlfriend, a deception that leads to consequences she never planned for, according to reports from the ceremony. Monika Kwiatkowska plays Kasia, the woman at the center of the story, which arrived in Warsaw fresh from the Orizzonti section at the Venice festival.

The jury honored the film "for its precise and delicate storytelling, its exceptional performances, and its complex portrait, devoid of judgment, of a flawed and elusive woman who undergoes a transformation as she slips into a stranger's identity and life, and therein finds the possibility of her own."

The Grand Prix carries a cash award of one hundred twenty thousand zloty, funded by the mayor of Warsaw, placing it among the more substantial prizes on the autumn festival circuit. The 42nd edition ran from October 9 to 18 with 190 titles in total, and the Saturday-night ceremony closed the program a day before the final screenings.

Directing and acting honors cross borders

The best director award went to Chinese filmmaker Cai Chengjie for Suzhou Quartet, described by the jury as "an original and ambitious concept brought to life through striking cinematography and daring experimentation with narrative form." The film follows four people who meet by chance in a small noodle shop and discover they are long-lost acquaintances, a story the jury called a visually captivating meditation on life and mortality. The directing prize comes with ten thousand zloty.

Maria Dębska received a special jury award for her performance in Through the Wall, directed by Maciej Sobieszczański. The black-and-white film follows two young political prisoners during the Stalinist terror in Poland who fall in love. The jury praised what it called "a remarkably precise and emotionally truthful portrayal" and a complex character created with great sensitivity and without exaggeration, adding that it was a role "that stays with the audience long after the film ends." The film also took the FIPRESCI award from the critics' jury, so both the main and critics' juries independently reached the same verdict. The special jury award carries five thousand zloty.

In the Competition 1-2 program for first and second features, the main award went to Agia by Greek director Lorin Terezi, about a young woman pushing back against patriarchal traditions. A special mention in the same program went to Urša Menart for Everything That's Wrong With You, while Swedish director Jens Sjögren earned a special mention in the international competition for Bloody Men.

Documentaries and audience picks close the program

The documentary competition award went to Jonas Spriestersbach's Meanwhile in Namibia, which examines Germany's response to its colonial occupation of Namibia. Berlin has offered development cooperation programs in place of reparations, a position the film subjects to scrutiny, according to coverage of the awards.

Audience votes decided the Polish Film Institute Award, which went to Beth de Araújo's Josephine, while Angelika Cygal's Dying of the Young Deer took the ORLEN Award for best Polish short. Special awards at the ceremony also came from the Speakers' Avenue Film School and the Polish Producers Alliance (KIPA), according to the critics' outlet The Disapproving Swede. The full winners list shows a program that mixed local discoveries with high-profile names.

Danny Boyle's Ink, Paul Greengrass's The Uprising and Paolo Strippoli's The Spiral served as centerpieces of the main program, drawing the kind of attention that has made the Warsaw competition a regular launchpad for films heading into awards season. Cai Chengjie's winning film lets its intertwined stories unfold at once and connects them across the screen, the jury said, a formal gamble that paid off with the directing prize.

Also in culture this week: the Academy Museum Gala's best-dressed looks, and the five-hundred-dollar animatronic breaking TikTok.