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Exclusive: The Kinoteka Polish Film Festival has set the lineup for its 21st edition, running March 9 — April 27 at venues across London.

The festival will open at the Institute of Contemporary Arts with the UK Premiere of Polish filmmaker Damian Kocur’s debut feature, Bread and Salt.

Inspired by true events, the pic follows Tymek, a young and talented student of the Warsaw Academy of Music who returns to his provincial hometown for vacation. Upon his return, he discovers that the central meeting point for local youth is a newly created kebab bar. Tymek witnesses a growing conflict between the shop workers, who are Arabs, and his friends from the neighborhood, leading to a conflict that will turn out to be tragic. The film debuted at Venice last year.

The festival will close with a gala screening of the 1977 film Top Dog (Wodzirej) at the Cine Lumiere in South Kensington. Causing...

The 73rd Venice International Film Festival will award its Golden Lion awards for lifetime achievement to French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo and Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski.

The festival noted that it plans to start awarding two Golden Lions for career achievement at each edition of the festival, starting this year. One will be to a director and one to an actor.

Belmondo is well known for films such as Breathless, Pierrot le Fou (which competed in Venice in 1965), Hit Man, That Man From Rio and The Professional.

Venice festival director Alberto Barbera said: “Thanks to his fascinating face, irresistible charm and extraordinary versatility, he has played roles in dramas, adventure movies and even comedies, making him a star who is universally respected, by engagé directors and escapist cinema alike.”

Skolimowski has enjoyed a 50-year career including his early Polish trilogy of Rysopis, Walkover and Barrier; The Departure; Deep End; The Shout; Moonlighting and Essential Killing (which won a special...

Above: Us poster for Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1965).As the 53rd New York Film Festival ends today, I thought I would go back half a century and take a look at the 3rd edition of the festival. Curated by Amos Vogel and Richard Roud, the then fledgling fest comprised 17 new features, 6 retrospective selections (ranging from Feuillade’s 1915 Les vampires to Godard’s 1960 Le petit soldat), and a number of shorts or demi-features (including Chris Marker’s The Koumiko Mystery). The main slate was chock-full of masterpieces (Gertrud, Alphaville, Charulata) and films by masters (Franju, Visconti, Kurosawa) and young turks on the rise (Straub, Bellocchio, Forman, Penn, Skolimowski). And there is only one film in the list—Laurence L. Kent’s Canadian indie Caressed—that I had never heard of before.In his introduction to the festival catalog Amos Vogel wrote:“Several fascinating, contradictory facts stand out in the 1965 New York film scene.

Skolimowski at work, from the December 1968 issue of Films and Filming,

via chained and perfumed.

Jerzy Skolimowski's comeback as a director after a break of nearly two decades threw many for a loop. The year was 2008, the venue was Cannes and the film was Four Nights with Anna. "Wait, what is this, exactly?" asked Daniel Kasman here in The Notebook. The answer Patrick Z McGavin settled on: "a small but crucial movie," and Skolimowski would follow it up with Essential Killing, which provoked far more resolute reactions, both positive and negative, when it premiered last fall in Venice.

Last month, Deep End (1970) emerged from legal limbo and, restored, it's currently touring the UK and sees a release on DVD in July. Now the full-blown retrospective The Cinema of Jerzy Skolimowski is on at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York through July 3 and, in Los Angeles, Cinefamily...

Polish film star forced into exile by the communist authorities

By the mid-1960s Elzbieta Czyzewska, who has died aged 72, was considered one of the brightest stars of film, theatre and television in Poland. However, she became persona non grata in her own country, only a few months after she was celebrated as the "pride of her generation" on the cover of a Polish magazine.

In 1965 she was appearing in a Warsaw production of Arthur Miller's autobiographical play After the Fall, in the role apparently based on Marilyn Monroe. In the audience was the American journalist David Halberstam, a correspondent for the New York Times, who had interviewed Czyzewska the day before. The pair married that year but Halberstam was expelled from Poland by the authorities for writing articles that criticised the communist regime. The government also condemned Czyzewska for marrying a "Zionist intellectual", and she left to join...