During the 4^th edition of TWO RIVERSIDES Festival 110 short films will be featured within IN THE SHORT RUN section and INDEPENDENT SCHOOL AND AMATEUR SHORT FILM COMPETITION. Among the titles you will find the most revelatory and memorable films of the 2009/2010 season.

The program of IN THE SHORT RUN section consists of over 50 shorts carefully selected at different film festivals- in Kraków, Rio de Janeiro, Rotterdam, Berlin, Cannes, Gdynia, Transylvania, Clermont-Ferrand, Locarno, Tallin, Gotteborg.

TWO RIVERSIDES Festival audience will have an opportunity to see Ying Liang’s Condolences, the winner of Tiger Awards Competition for Short Films at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam, and Sarah Wood’s Only for Cultural Purposes, also featured at the festival in Rotterdam. The former one will have its Polish premiere during TWO RIVERSIDES Festival. It is a story full of black humor, compassion and reserve. Long takes used in the film keep the viewers in tension, making them wait for the one and significant detail. The latter is a unique poignant film-essay in which the director tries to reconstruct the history of the film archive in Beirut, destroyed during the Israeli invasion in 1982.

Among the films featured within this section there are nominees and winners of the 2010 Academy Awards. Francois Alaux’s Logorama, the winner of the Academy Award for the Best Animated Short Film, is a story of a world made of logotypes in which policemen- Michelin man figurines- are trying to catch a criminal named Ronald McDonald. Francise O. Joubert’s French Roast was also nominated for the Award in this category.

Bartek Kulas was awarded the Silver  Hobby-Horse at the Cracow Film Festival for the film Millhaven in which he illustrates the story of Loretta, a heroine of the dark ballad sang by Nick Cave. Another film, Incident By a Bank, directed by Ruben Ostlund, was awarded at the festivals in Cracow and Berlin. Made by the use of only one camera, this engrossing film attracts our attention and allows us to observe how people react in unexpected situations.


Hanoi-Warsaw, a 35-mm short film directed by Katarzyna Klimkiewicz, was the only Polish short feature film qualified for the international competition at the Cracow Film Festival. It also received nomination for the European Film Award in the Best Short Film category. The picture tells a story of a young Vietnamese girl who crossed the Polish border illegally. The director of the film will be our Festival guest this year.

Another example of a successful Polish film is Danny Boy, Marek Skrobecki’s puppet-animated short, which was qualified for the competition at the International Animation Festival in Japan – Hiroshima 2010, and featured at the festivals in Edinburgh and Cracow.

Richard Martin-Jordan’s documentary film entitled God is American will have its Polish premiere at TWO RIVERSIDES Festival after having been screened at over 40 different festivals around the world. It’s a moving and unbelieveable story of one tribe worshipping… an American soldier who used to be stationed on their island during World War II.

Sophia Tzavelli’s medium-length documentary, Hotel Paradies, will move us into the realities of a Bulgarian province where the time has stopped. What happened with the title ‘paradise’? You will have a chance to learn the answer to this question during the screening of the fim and during the meeting with the author who accepted our invitation to the Festival.


This year shorts created by young directors will be featured before full-length films presented in GREAT CINEMA IN THE SMALL MARKET SQUARE, MUSIC MY LOVE and I LOVE CINEMA sections. In this way we want to enable them to present their works on the big screen.