Studio Filmowe KRONIKA

The protagonist of the film "Klawisz" is Jan Doliński, a former guard of the Lublin Castle prison, who held his post during the German occupation and remained in it almost until the prison was liquidated in 1954. He was dismissed because he did not want to join the Polish United Workers' Party.

Once one of the world’s biggest lakes, the Aral Sea has all but vanished. Marcin Sauter’s film focuses on what remains in an area that once flourished, on the fates of people who had to adapt to life in the desert and now ponder over their solitude among the wrecks of ships and port cranes.

The Ursus factory once covered 170 hectares and employed 20,000 workers, producing 100 tractors a day. Now, its buildings stand derelict and empty; half have already been demolished by investors with new plans. The symphony of mechanical sounds and gestures that is gradually built up throughout the film is produced by former factory employees. Proud of their factory, they reminisce about the huge numbers of people and the parties they had. They were a community, passionate about supporting agriculture through their factory. The Ursus tractor was well-known, not only in Poland but throughout the world.

An account of Halina Borek's long 52-year search for the grave of her bestially murdered father. Her recollections are accompanied by excerpts from an original film shot during the exhumation of the remains of Polish officers. The film is narrated by archaeologist Zdzislaw Sawicki, who was one of the first to uncover the secrets of the Katyn graves.

The film was made at the Polish Sculpture Center in Oransko, during sculpture workshops for deaf-blind people. The camera shows the process of creation, which is closely connected with getting to know oneself. It is accompanied by hesitation, anger and joy.

Henryk Greenberg is a Polish-born American who lost much of his family in the Holocaust. Certain of the location where his father and younger brother were murdered, Greenberg returns to find most of his former neighbors predictably claiming foggy memories at first; but soon their recollections come more easily.

The burner bursts with flame, hot air fills the shell, the aerostat soars. In the gondola of the balloon - Norman Davies. He is not looking for strong impressions, inspiration or beautiful views, but for the right perspective. For a historian, according to the film's protagonist, "should distance himself from his object of research. One must not be too close, too emotionally involved. That's why I will look at Wroclaw from a certain height..." Such a perception of Breslau has been sorely lacking in the distant and near past, especially in the past, the twentieth century - the century in which unleashed nationalisms resulted in the bloodiest spasms in the history of mankind.

Russians working at the bazaar near the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw talk about their everyday life.

Józef Gębski's film is a documentary reconstruction of the crime committed by NKVD officers against Polish officers imprisoned in Starobielsk and Kharkov in 1940. Accounts of historians and prosecutors are juxtaposed with the testimony of the then heads of the central and regional NKVD board.

A kind of film essay on the life and work of Gustav Herling-Grudzinski. The writer's story about his life is interspersed with documentary footage shot in Naples, where he has lived for thirty years (hence the title), and in Warsaw, during a visit to Poland in 1994.

The film tells the story of pilots, American volunteers who fought in the Polish-Bolshevik war.

Made just before the protagonist's death, Maria Kwiatkowska's film is a documentary portrait of one of the most outstanding Polish fashion and portrait photographers, Benedykt Jerzy Dorys. The co-founder of the Union of Polish Art Photographers talks about his artistic path and his personal life.

In 1980, Krzysztof Kieslowski asked hundreds of people the same three questions: what year were you born? who are you? what would you like/what is important to you? From the recorded statements, he eventually selected 44 people and ranked them chronologically, guided by the age of the interviewees: from the youngest to the oldest so that there was one person's statement for each vintage. A gallery of talking heads: from kindergarten children, through schoolchildren, students, engineers, electricians, nurses, priests, writers, sociologists, cab drivers, to pensioners even a hundred years old, made up a collective portrait of a Pole - a keen observer of reality, aware of his identity and the place where he lives, eager for change. A quarter of a century later, Krzysztof Wierzbicki repeated that idea here.

11-year-old Werka and her 9-year-old brother Marcel wind up at the front door of a children's home in Wroclaw. Asked who they are, Werka replies, "We are children of communists." In return the teacher yells, "Why do they only send us Judeo-communists?!!!" It is 1949. Werka and Marcel's mother, a pre-war communist, is arrested and charged with collaborating with American intelligence. She will do five and half years. Her children will spend these years in other children's homes. A film about a brother and a sister marked with the ideological choices of their parents.

The first documentary by Wojciech Staroń. He just finished film school, his wife Małgosia just became a teacher. The year is 1997. They decide to go for a year deep into Siberia: she’ll teach Polish, he’ll shoot a film. And this is that beautiful film, narrated in the first person by Małgosia as she meets all sorts of colorful characters and reflects upon reality with her beautiful, monotone voice, seeing the good in people individually and collectively. This is also about her transformation in this travel undertaken in the centuries-old fashion of the observer who, by observing others, observes herself.

The history of Poland told through fragments of movies produced by Wytwórnia Filmów Fabularnych.