The festival is scheduled to take place from November 13 to 17.
Dorota Reksińska of the city’s Muza Cinema, who came up with the idea for the event, has said that the festival will showcase the cultures of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, focusing on the diversity of these regions and "the context of colonial and post-colonial countries."
Reksińska stressed "the enormous potential" of what is intended to become an annual fixture on the cultural calendar of Poznań, a city of more than 500,000 in west-central Poland.
This potential stems from “not only the extraordinary historical achievements of British cinema but also its highly interesting development in recent years," according to Reksińska.
'United Kingdom of Cinema'
She said the festival, held under the motto “United Kingdom of Cinema,” would be a wide-ranging celebration of British culture going far beyond cinema.
“We’ll be having tea-time at 5 p.m., a red telephone box and a double-decker in front of the cinema, Monty Python and Beatles hits, Harry Potter, Mr. Bean, Paddington Bear, James Bond and much more,” she told state news agency PAP.
Among the highlights of the British Film Festival is an Alfred Hitchcock retrospective, marking the 125th anniversary of the director’s birth. It includes the screening of his 1927 silent movie The Lodger with live music.
Another retrospective will focus on acclaimed Scottish director Lynne Ramsay. A special guest of the event, she will present a cross-section of her output comprising both popular films, such as We Need to Talk About Kevin and You Were Never Really Here and her lesser known earlier features and documentaries.
The festival’s First Things First section will include Last Swim, which won Sasha Nathwani the top accolade at this year’s Berlin Festival.
Meanwhile, the Mind the Gap section focuses on social realism movies with Alan Clarke’s Made in Britain and Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette, and the Five O’clock section is devoted to films that bring to life the atmosphere of the former British Empire.
(mk/gs)
