February was an extraordinary month for Polish cinema. The country’s filmmakers won two Silver Bears at the Berlin International Film Festival and three of its films were nominated for Academy Awards, including “Ida” — Pawel Pawlikowski’s black-and-white drama set in 1962 that deals with Stalinism and the Holocaust — which became the first Polish movie to win the Oscar for best foreign language film. On Monday, the country’s own awards ceremony, the Eagles, held in Warsaw and sponsored by the Polish Film Academy, recognized a slate of new films that were critically acclaimed, thematically challenging and — perhaps most significant — very popular among local audiences.
Dariusz Jablonski, the president of the Polish Film Academy — which counts among its members the directors Roman Polanski and Andrzej Wajda, among others — said all the international recognition might help Polish filmmakers cast off a long-held inferiority complex. “We knew that we were making good films but we lacked self-confidence,” Mr. Jablonski said. “We were convinced that nobody was interested in our films. This is a confirmation which changes minds — especially of young filmmakers here.”
The recognition at home and abroad of Poland’s recent cinematic achievements follows a year of significant growth in its film market. Cinema admissions were up more than 11 percent from the previous year — one of the highest increases for any European Union country, according to the European Audiovisual Observatory. And the percentage of the box office that came from locally produced films — about 27 percent — is among the highest rates in Europe, trailing France but narrowly beating Britain and Germany.
Mr. Jablonski attributes much of the renaissance in Polish cinema to a law, introduced a decade ago, that created a government-sponsored fund that provides approximately $50 million a year in financing for film projects and training. That source of money led to a creative boom, but national audiences didn’t really pay much attention to the new critically successful films until 2012, when Agnieszka Holland’s “In Darkness” — about children living in the sewers of the Nazi-occupied Polish city of Lwow — was nominated for an Oscar. After that, more than one million Poles came out to watch the film, Mr. Jablonski said, adding: “That was a very interesting moment — the first sign of an intelligent audience turning toward Polish films.”
But the Oscar for “Ida” might signal that Polish cinema is entering an era of even greater prominence. “I think that altogether the growth of quality, the growth in the amount of films, this international recognition creates amazing possibilities for us,” said Mr. Jablonski, a filmmaker and producer himself who began his career assisting the director Krzysztof Kieslowski, who died in 1996. “At the beginning of the ’90s, when I went to the U.K., everyone was saying, ‘Bring me another Kieslowski.’ Now I hope that everybody is saying ‘Give me another Pawlikowski.’ And we have them.”
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