Polish Contemporary Cinema. Between Right-wing Cultural Policy and Netflix Imperialism

This paper researches topical Ukrainian and Poland cinema narratives related to interaction with the representatives of other nationalities in the territory of one country. The purpose of the research is to analyse changes in intercultural narratives related to the national stereotypes in contemporary films. The current development stage of the world culture requires new narratives –signals about that appear in the world and Ukrainian cinema. For Ukraine, these narratives become especially relevant after 2014. Now, the Ukrainians are thinking over their history and their relationship with those who the history united them with in a new way. This is perfectly illustrated by the films under analysis, Why I Am Alive (Ukrainian title: Chomu ya zhyvyi) (2015) and Shchedryk (2022), where the characters build a new discourse of their value-based existence by getting released from national stereotypes. Some stereotypes are analysed extensively in relation to films Lessons of Farsi, The Pianist, The Jew (Żyd).

The Korean film business has witnessed a swift and steady growth in the production of, and audiences for, domestic films over the past several years. This article attempts to clarify the cause of these changes and goes on to discuss the Korean film industry with a special focus on state cultural policy. The article then explicates the impact of the changing cultural policy on the film business by examining the influx of domestic capital into the film industry. It also analyzes the impact of neoliberal cultural policies on the transnationalization of the Korea film industry. Finally, it discusses whether changing cultural policies have maintained or developed cultural identity, such as Korean traditions and nationalism, in domestic films.

The paper aims at diagnosing the underlying causes for the state of visual culture in Poland and indicating the directions of the new cultural policy for the country. The method applied is a combination of auto-ethnography with analytical development of several hypotheses based on the materials from the realm of cultural anthropology. Part of the reasoning conducted in the article is important methodologically and intended for practitioners. It is based on the comparison between today’s challenges facing the devisers of cultural policy and the challenges from 30 years ago, when the author was building a project of cultural policy for the government of those days. Due to the lack of decisive legitimisation of activities in the ideological sphere, the author defines cultural policy as enhancing the values and mitigating the flaws in the existing state of culture. The crucial thesis of the text positions the source of divisions in the contemporary Polish visual culture in the ideological sphere. The ideological division is discussed in the text in the categories of modernizers and conservatives. As a crucial part of symbolic culture connected with visual perception, the visual culture is divided according to beliefs which have either a radically discursive character (in the light of contemporary science one cannot unambiguously resolve their truthfulness) or they remain impossible to be captured rationally. They are a matter of faith and embedded in religious rituals. That is why, among others, we cannot ignore the philosophical foundations of cognition. Part of the article refers to the readiness of contemporary humanities to address the complicated issues of the cognitive theories in the light of such directions of thought as post-correlationism. As a result, a comparison between the resolutions enhancing the coexistence of the state and free market in the sphere of culture, postulated in the project of cultural policy from 1998, and the contemporary dysfunctional cohabitation of the camp of radical modernizers with the camp of conservatives, allows the author to formulate – in the form of a project – a number of proposals. They have character of philosophical and ideological theses as well as organizational and institutional proposals. Additionally, a question was posed about the need to establish a state institution monitoring the cases of ideological ‘corruption’ in the public institutions of culture. The conclusions are formulated in over a dozen points. What was found to be relevant is, among others, the emphasis of the significance of modernity as a modernizing option, supporting the local cultural potential and Christianity as a reservoir of idiomatic forms of intellectual speculation.

The author discusses the problem of the so-called low circulation of contemporary Polish popular music (music released on flexi discs, wedding music, a broad range of amateur music production, football chants, amateur rock music). He analyses music tastes of the Polish working class and the social functioning of genres and styles of music, characteristic of these tastes, reflecting on the crucial moments in cultural policy and the most important turning points in history: “Polish thaw” in 1956, the consequences of the 1968 events, the indigenous model of mass culture in the 1970s, the situation after the martial law and the transformation of the political system in 1989.

This article is devoted to the scientific classification and analysis of Russian impact content in the context of contemporary film marketing strategies. Impact content, aimed at producing social influence, is gaining particular relevance in the era of digital media expansion and growing public demand for socially meaningful formats. Based on an analysis of 37 Russian films released between 2020 and 2024, the study explores key classification criteria: content type, genre, thematic orientation, audience value focus, and marketing potential. The author identifies the dominance of fiction films, the prevalence of comedy and family drama genres, an emphasis on cultural and social themes, and the predominance of mass and socially partnered distribution channels. The article substantiates the necessity of a differentiated classification system for impact content that considers the specific features of the Russian film industry. Using content analysis and semiotic interpretation methods, the author proposes a tool for further research into positioning and promotion strategies of socially oriented cinematic products. This study may be of interest to professionals in the fields of creative industries, media planning, cultural policy, and the sociology of culture.

The theme of death in contemporary Polish documentary cinema is increasingly present, which is distinctly evidenced by the creative works of Marcin Koszałka, who debunks one more social taboo. The author of the paper is interested in the intimate presentation of death, which, on the one hand, has a provocative dimension, and, on the other, it stems from the personal need to confess, which is carried out by the film alter egos of Koszałka, for example by his sister in Ucieknijmy od niej [Let’s run away from her] or by Piotr Korczak in Deklaracja nieśmiertelności [Declaration of Independence]. The films made by Koszałka - the author of Istnienie [The Existence] are based on baroque concepts which, by shocking the audience with their form, are meant to ask fundamental existential questions. Koszałka’s creative output is viewed by scholars first of all from the standpoint of self-treatment, which seems insuficient: when analyzing Koszałka’s films, it is impossible to avoid an ethical or existentialist perspective Another interesting and separate example of intimate presentation of the death theme is the film by Adam Sikora Paweł [Paul], which presents the Mikołów Institute director suffering from cancer: the camera accompanies Paweł Targiel’s “confession”, which reveals the stream of consciousness of the departing man. These extremely different presentations: baroque pieces by Koszałka and ascetic ones by Sikora essentially ask the same questions about the limits of documentary cinema.

This paper attempts to define the complex attitude to the tradition in Poland of fact-driven cinema shared by members of the young generation of Polish documentary filmmakers. The examples of films by Marcin Koszalka and Wojciech Staron, and Tomasz Wolski’s The Lucky Ones, discussed in greater detail, illustrate various shades of this complex attitude, oscillating between affirmation and opposition. The article argues against criticism that demands contemporary cinema take up certain issues and discard others.

The collapse in 1989 of so-called “really existing socialism” in Poland affected the population in a profound way. The purpose of this essay is to establish how Polish films reflect and assess these changes. I am interested in the representation of society, especially the situation of young people, families and the functioning of institutions, such as education, the police and the church. I limit my analysis to a representative handful of films, which are set in contemporary Poland and have been praised by Polish critics for “catching the spirit of the time.” The films are: Nic (Nothing, 1998), directed by Dorota Kedzierzawska; Dł ug (Debt, 1999), directed by Krzysztof Krauze; Patrzę na ciebie, Marysiu (I Look at You, Mary, 1999), directed by Łukasz Barczyk; Cześć , Tereska (Hello, Tereska, 2001) directed by Robert Gliński; and Portret podwójny (Double Portrait, 2001), directed by Mariusz Front. The observations contained in these films and the conclusions one can draw from them can be extended to other films made in the same period. The films presented in this paper were all made at the end of the first decade following the collapse of communism—not immediately after 1989. I chose them because they were part of a broader upsurge of high quality films about contemporary Poland, sharing a concern for style, and suggesting that filmmakers needed a certain temporal distance before engaging with the new Poland in novel ways.

What is the structure of contemporary melodrama, and how does that structure relate to imaginary media? These questions are the residue from the research that I conducted for my last book, Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg (2010),' when I began to consider the frequent appearances of imaginary media in Maddin's other films, and the astonishing range of media techniques deployed in their production. Maddin is one of contemporary cinema's premier melodramatists, so the regular appearance of imaginary media in his work deserves some consideration. Fanciful devices such as the giant scope that the heroine uses to observe the world's beating heart in Heart of the World (2002)2 and the Aerophone in Brand upon the Brain! (2008)3 play supporting roles in Maddin's films, but, in The Night Mayor (2009),4 fictional device called the Telemelodium takes center stage. Through the fabrication of its history, and the history of its inventor, Nihad Ademi, Maddin depicts Canada as melodramatic nation sutured together by the broadcasting of its dreams.The Telemelodium presents an apposite allegory for the ideological function of the Office National du Film du Canada/National Film Board of Canada (NFB or ONF/NFB). The Night Mayor was commissioned in 2009 for the NFB's seventieth anniversary (founded 1939) by Cindy Whitten, Director General of the NFB English Program. What Maddin produced, slyly, is film about the difference between the cultural armature of the Canadian government as it might have been, kind of technological armature that aids and abets the creation of an Imaginary utopia, and the grim alternative, an instrument of cultural policy weighed down by its own bureaucracy and instrumentalist requirements for official communication. This is where the imaginary media forms that manifest in the thematic content of the film (the Telemelodium itself) and the material effects of the Real (the flickering film, the odd murky sound track) merge, producing film that celebrates noise over signal as political as well as aesthetic choice. In the process, it also suggests that one of the differences between the structure of twenty-first-century melodrama and that of early-twentieth-century melodrama is the way that each is articulated with specific media technologies.On 4 March 2009, the NFB issued press release announcing that, as part of the celebrations for their seventieth anniversary, Guy Maddin had been commissioned to begin work on The Night Mayor.5 The official synopsis of this film reads as follows: Winnipeg, 1939: Inventor Nihad Ademi harnesses the waves of the Aurora Borealis and uses the power to broadcast images of Canada to its own citizens from coast to coast. The unregulated imagery enrages the government, who send crack team of federal agents to shut Nihad's project down.6 The entirety of the film, approximately fourteen minutes long, is available for viewing on the NFB's website (http://www.nfb.ca/film/night_mayor).The Night Mayor is nonlinear barrage of short shots stitched together with stream-of-consciousness, dreamy first-person narration from Bosnian emigre Nihad Ademi, interspersed with short expository interjections from two of his six adult children: Dado/David and Selma. Maddin s work is anything but plot-driven, but, for those who have not seen the film, here is brief summary: Obsessed with the night sky, Ademi, tuba-playing musician, falls in love with the sounds of the Northern Lights. Abandoning his tuba, he invents new instrument he dubs the Telemelodium, which he constructs and perfects with the help of his children. At first, Ademi only wants to share the music of the Aurora with the rest of Canada, but he soon discovers that the music has optical powers. For Ademi, the images that his invention creates from the light of the false dawn epitomize specific sort of knowledge: Mine is the peculiar truth which comes from the false, he says. Dado/David describes the Telemelodium as a kind of natural television, which converted the music made by the Aurora Borealis into moving pictures. …

This paper examines the transformation of television production, specifically focusing on film programming within the digital environment from an editorial perspective at Radio Television of Serbia (RTS). The study delves into the transition from traditional analog broadcasting, where a single film was aired once a week, often a western, to the complexities of modern digital television production, which incorporates advanced organizational and technical skills, as well as the integration of contemporary technologies in program realization.The research highlights the increasing importance of editorial work in creating diverse and engaging content that caters to various demographic groups, with a special focus on the responsibilities of editors in shaping program quality and audience engagement. As television production has evolved into a leading creative sector, it now encompasses a wide range of genres, multimedia content, and interactive media, reflecting significant changes in both cultural and organizational strategies within the media landscape.The paper also explores the impact of globalization, technological advancements, and changing cultural policies on the development of national public service broadcasters like RTS. It discusses how these institutions have adapted to the challenges posed by a rapidly changing media environment, such as the increasing demand for efficiency, the expansion of content, and the inclusion of marginalized social groups in the programming.Through the examination of editorial practices in contemporary film programming, this work aims to offer insights into the evolving role of editorial decisions in shaping television content, as well as their contribution to the broader cultural and educational objectives of public broadcasting in the digital age.Top of Form

This article examines small film festivals in the socio-cultural context of Senegal. Through the case study of the Banlieue Films Festival (BFF) in Dakar, founded in 2013 by Abdel Aziz Boye, I analyse the crucial role of festivals in strengthening the film industry, fostering cinephilia and encouraging the practical application of cultural policies. I suggest that contemporary film production, particularly, in the past five years (2015-2020) has been significantly shaped by grassroots initiatives that have eventually been transformed into structures. I also explore the role of “rooted cosmopolitans”, borrowing Kwame Appiah’s term in relation to the figure of Abdel Aziz Boye, who founded Ciné UCAD at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop, in Dakar, Ciné Banlieue, and, upon returning to Senegal from France, the BFF. I discuss BFF’s various forms of legacy, concluding that it has been an active agent in forging a new cinephilia and inspiring a wave of young filmmakers in Senegal.