Don’t stay at home, go to the cinema! Saturday at WATCH DOCS | WATCH DOCS

During the first weekend of the 25th edition of the WATCH DOCS festival, we are offering, among other events, a discussion on contemporary journalism, a screening of the Cannes-awarded IMAGO, and a meeting with the creators of Kumotry (The Godmothers).

At 5:00 p.m. at KINOMUZEUM, we invite you to the Polish premiere of the film "Kumotry". As the festival’s programming director Konrad Wirkowski writes, it is “a story of the friendship between women living in a dying Polish village in the Romanian Carpathians. Hanka and Bronka have already buried their husbands; their children have gone abroad in search of different, better prospects. These self-reliant and independent protagonists impress with their optimism, even though their reality is inevitably fading into the past. What remains are memories of times that will not return—and facing the challenges of everyday life together.”

After the screening, the director Emilia Śniegoska will meet with the audience.

Meanwhile, at Kinoteka at 6:00 p.m., a screening and meeting with the creators of the film Do You Love Me will begin. The film is a cinematic love letter to Beirut. “Lana Daher’s film, expertly edited from thousands of archival fragments of feature films, documentaries, and amateur recordings, is an extraordinary cinematic feast, full of style, action, and pop-cultural references. The capital of Lebanon, for years synonymous with glamour and political instability, concentrates the region’s problems like a magnifying glass. Beirut is a civil war smoldering for decades, bankers and refugees, and religious militias.”

Audiences will also meet Déni Oumar Pitsaev, director of the Cannes-awarded film "IMAGO" – a story about otherness, but above all about the timeless, universal conflict between the individual and the community. The director, who has lived in Belgium for years, attempts to find his place within the Chechen diaspora inhabiting a picturesque mountain valley in Georgia.
KINOMUZEUM, 8:00 p.m.

Cover-Up and Debate

At Muranów cinema, there is a special opportunity today to see Laura Poitras’s latest film "Cover-Up (Concealed: Seymour Hersh on the Trail of Truth)" – made together with Mark Obenhaus and premiered this year at the Venice Film Festival. The documentary by one of the most important figures in contemporary documentary filmmaking, the Oscar-winning director of Citizenfour, portrays Seymour Hersh, who for decades shaped American investigative journalism by revealing the most closely guarded secrets of our times.

After the screening, the first debate of this year’s WATCH DOCS will take place: “Verified Information. Journalism in an Age of Distrust.” Can we even speak today about verified sources of information? For years, the profession of journalist has ranked among the ten least trusted occupations – yet investigative journalism was meant to be the foundation of democracy and oversight of power. Why do the secrets of those in power uncovered by the media no longer resonate in society as strongly as we might expect?

The screening begins at 7:00 p.m., the debate at 9:15 p.m.