Their cinema is intriguingly distinct, surprising in its wealth of cinematic forms and literary tropes. Never obvious, in metaphor and camouflage, it diagnoses and talks about what is happening around us.
It captures everything important, irritating, suppressed and painful in contemporary Poland. It is the cinema of extreme topicality, which pulsates with political engagement and social sensitivity, yet without journalistic verbosity. Anka Sasnal and Wilhelm Sasnal are joining the heroes and heroines of this year's retrospectives. Their work will be presented during the 25th BNP Paribas New Horizons International Film Festival (17-27 July in Wrocław, online until 3 August), and the duo themselves will be present in Wrocław.
‘Anka Sasnal and Wilhelm Sasnal have been present at the festival in Wrocław with all their subsequent films since their joint feature debut, It Looks Pretty from a Distance. The jubilee edition, which looks back at the history of New Horizons and sketches out visions of the future, is the perfect moment for a retrospective of the artists who created this history together with us’—emphasises the curator of the retrospective, Ewa Szabłowska.
During the festival, we will present five films made jointly by the duo:
- It Looks Pretty From a Distance (2011)
- Parasite (2013)
- The Sun, the Sun Blinded Me (2016)
- We Haven’t Lost Our Way (2022)
- The Assistant (2025)
The premiere of the last of them will take place at the festival. Apart from Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal, Wrocław will host their regular collaborators, actors and actresses: Agnieszka Podsiadlik, Joanna Drozda, Rafał Maćkowiak, Małgorzata Zawadzka, Andrzej Konopka, Agnieszka Żulewska, Piotr Trojan and Roman Garncarczyk, who will take part in meetings with the audience.
On Tuesday, 22 July, you are welcome to join a unique masterclass with the filmmakers, who will select one scene from each movie and discuss the chosen cinematic techniques and dramaturgical assumptions. Each scene will be a starting point for discussing their recurring filmographic themes: collective and individual memory, fear of strangers, socially engaged and engaging cinema. Viewers will also watch several never-before-seen materials from the Sasnal family film archive. The masterclass will be hosted by Kuba Mikurda.
On the evening of 22 July, at the Arsenal Festival Club, Wilhelm Sasnal will share his passion for music and show a selection of his short films – original music videos for his favourite songs, recordings of everyday life, short films shot on 8mm and 16mm film – accompanied by a soundtrack composed of songs featured in the films and a playlist of tracks that have special meaning for Wilhelm.
‘The Sasnals' films record a unique process – observation, thinking, reading, reacting. Every subsequent film grows out of the previous one, yet undermining and expanding it, trying to do what the previous one failed to achieve. There is no other filmography in contemporary Polish cinema that is so organic, so restless and, in a sense, so ‘Polish’,' writes Kuba Mikurda in the introduction to the retrospective.
TOK FM radio is the media partner of the retrospective.
The 25th BNP Paribas New Horizons International Film Festival in Wrocław will be held on 17-27 July. Thanks to its virtual edition, you can invite the festival into your home for an extra week, until 3 August. The full program of the event will be announced on 1 July, and on 3 July, tickets for in-person screenings and access to virtual screenings will go on sale.
