2018 New Horizons IFF Dailies: Boa Sorte ou Boa Morte | Day 2 of IONCINEMA in Wroclaw

I’m writing this from a bagel joint located on the bustling side street next to Kino Nowe Horyzonty, which is a comforting discovery and a not entirely obvious one, especially if you tend to use the main entrance to the cinema. But just exit through a side door and you can leave the cinema crowd behind to find… well, more crowds, only with added gelato, sandwiches and fried things. I adhere to a strict policy of exclusively local food when I travel, but an American friend recommended these bagels as ‘the best outside of NY’, so I was curious. Are they as good as advertised? Definitely, though with five films on the schedule for today, I probably wouldn’t know otherwise.

For my first full day at the festival, I dug deep into the Discoveries section, enjoying a few good picks from Brazil (Juliana Antunes‘ Baronesa), China (Miaoyan Zhang‘s Silent Mist) and Hungary (One Day – feature debut for helmer Zsófia Szilágyi who was assistant to director Ildikó Enyedi for On Body and Soul).

Not by design, I lined up three woman-centric meditations on the boundaries of one’s community (the favela, the village, and the European trenches of a nuclear family) that left me impressed. Once you take away the glamour of the Cannes titles, and the more local focus of the Polish films, this section really is the beating heart of the festival: it’s that mid-layer for which the selection needs to be on point, and where it’s easier to find merely average material. Like pretty much everywhere else across the programme, the quality is high and the filmmaking is diverse and challenging.

Also challenging is walking in the pouring rain from the main festival venue to the new addition for this year: the Dolnośląskie Centrum Filmowe, a brisk 15 minutes down south from Old Town and hidden away at the center of a residential courtyard. The meaty retrospectives are shown here, and my first screening (Silvestre) in the João César Monteiro section did not disappoint: a radical reinterpretation of Portuguese folklore with a young Maria de Medeiros possessed by an unflinching desire to fight against the ancient order of a male-dominated world. I’m going back for more tomorrow, hopefully adding some early Pedro Costa into the mix. Boa sorte ou boa morte.