ZAMEK Culture Centre

In 2024, we are expanding the geographical notion of the Very Near East. The attention of the filmmakers and curators will focus on the situation in Palestine, where we will travel with Ambulance, a dark, first-person account of the 2014 war in Gaza, and No Other Land, a film portraying the decades-long legal battle of the Palestinian residents to retain the rights to their village. We are not going to forget about the developments closest to us—on the border with Belarus for instance—captured by Kasia Smutniak in Walls and Agnieszka Zwiefka in Silent Trees. The directors adopted distinct perspectives, portraying collective and individual vicissitudes, but neither misses the fact that the human person is the most important and the most significant in the whole situation. On the other hand, we are going to look at the war in Ukraine from the standpoint of animals, which the heroine of Everything Needs to Live decided to rescue.