23/03/2017 - Submissions for the 33rd edition of the festival, to be held from 13-22 October 2017, will be accepted until 31 July

Poland’s Warsaw Film Festival has opened its call for feature-length fiction and documentary films as well as short films (of all genres). For the competitive sections, the programming team expects the films to meet certain criteria: the movie should not have been screened publically before 1 January 2017, or have been broadcasted on television or via a VoD service. Also, the submitted films must not have been presented at any other Eastern European festival (with the exception of those in their country or countries of production), and the festival will give priority to world, international and European premieres. The remaining eligibility criteria can be found here.

The Warsaw Film Festival runs a number of competitive sections – the International Competition, the 1-2 Competition (for first and second feature films), the Free Spirit Competition (for innovative films – both fiction and documentary), the Documentary Competition and the Short Film Competition. The awards in all sections are monetary and vary between 1,000 and 100,000 zlotys (approximately €230-€23,000), and they are handed to the director or directors of the films. In recent years, the Grand Prix has been presented to such titles as Malaria [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2016), Neon Bull [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] (2015), The Coffin in the Mountain (2014) and Ida [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Pawel Pawlikowski
interview: Pawel Pawlikowski
film profile] (2013).

The non-competitive sections of the festival are Discoveries (for fiction and documentary films), Special Screenings, Classics from Poland, The Best Shorts from Poland 2016 and Family Cinema Weekend.

The Warsaw Film Festival was established in 1985, and since 2009, it has enjoyed competitive status, as granted by the International Federation of Film Producers Associations (FIAPF). In 2016, the WFF presented almost 180 short and feature films.