Blog: Film festivals

Established in 1985, the Warsaw Film Festival joined in 2009 the elite group of events recognized by the International Federation of Film Producers Associations (www.fiapf.org) as international non-specialised film festivals - next to Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Locarno, San Sebastian, Karlovy Vary, Tokyo, Mar del Plata, Shanghai, Cairo, Fajr, Goa, and Tallinn.

The WFF differs from other festivals in its programme, just as Warsaw differs from other cities. Selecting the films, we always remember about our audience - native Varsovians, those working or studying in Warsaw, and those in town for a short while, for instance only for the Festival.

We do our best to make sure that our audiences get to know the latest and most interesting trends in world cinema as soon as possible. In this way, WFF audiences - usually as the first people in Poland - could discover American independent cinema as well as Asian, Latin American, Iranian, Russian and Romanian cinema. Some of the most amazing directors, like Michael Haneke, Cristian Mungiu, Paweł Pawlikowski, Ari Folman, Ashgar Farhadi, Lenny Abrahamson and hundreds of others, had usually been guests of the WFF before they reached the top.

We have been expanding the professional part of the WFF for over fifteen years. We realize that film festivals are part of the giant mechanism that is the global film industry. We do our best to make sure that the world takes note of Polish films, that they get screened at leading festivals, that they find their way into international distribution.

We started off modestly, in 2000, with screenings of new Polish projects for barely a dozen foreign guests. Five years later, we held the CentEast Market for the first time: a meeting place for professionals interested in films from Eastern Europe, described by The Hollywood Reporter as “the go-to event”. From 2009 till 2016, together with our Russian partner TVINDIE we have been presenting - in Warsaw and Moscow - films that are still works-in-progress but in which we want to interest sales agents and distributors. Similar presentations we organised at the Beijing Film Market from 2013-2016, with our Chinese partner Film Factory, under the name China-Eastern Europe Film Promotion Project.