An official screening of “Warsaw Uprising” at the 39. GFF

One of the most important events of the 39. Gdynia Film Festival will be an official screening of “Warsaw Uprising” with the attendance of special guests, the authors of the film. The screening is organised together with the Warsaw Rising Museum. One day later, a memorial board with the profiles of the Uprising chroniclers will be set in the emerging Gdynia Film Centre.

The Special Screening of the film will take place on 19 September 2014 in Multikino. The Gdynia screening will be an opportunity for a discussion on the work of the Uprising cinematographers and their influence on the creation of the post-war Polish Film School. It will be attended by the legends of the contemporary cinema as well as by the authors of this unusual film, the world first war non-fiction drama fully edited from documentary materials.

Within the Festival, an unusual ceremony has been planned: as part of celebrating the 70. anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, in cooperation with the Warsaw Rising Museum, a board commemorating the Uprising cinematographers, the co-creators of the Polish cinematography, will take place on 20 September 2014 at 3:00 p.m. The board will become a part of the emerging Gdynia Film Centre, which is emphasised by the Artistic Director of the Festival, Michał Oleszczyk: “It will be one of the most significant moments of the Festival and I am proud that together with the Warsaw Rising Museum, we will pay tribute to the courage of the people who, by their cinematography work, gave us a real testimony of heroism and suffering that the whole Uprising was filled with.”

“Warsaw Uprising” treats of the events of that time through the story of two young reporters, witnesses of the Uprising fights. The film uses authentic newsreels from August 1944. Using modern technology of colourisation and reconstruction of audiovisual materials as well as inviting a group of brilliant filmmakers to co-operation, the authors made a project that has no equivalent worldwide. Since its premiere in May 2014, the film has been seen by almost 600 000 viewers from the whole Poland, and the image took the fifth place in the Polish film box office of 2014.

Six hours of original Warsaw Uprising newsreels; seven months of work; a team of consultants related to the militaria, clothes, architecture, also planners, varsavians and historians; 1000 hours of colour consultations; 1200 shots; 1440 hours of colourisation and reconstruction; 112,000 selected frames; 648,000 minutes of reconstruction; 22,971,520 megabytes of data – these are only some of the numbers allowing for the realisation, at least a partial one, of the enormous amount of labour and resources placed in the implementation of the “Warsaw Uprising” Project. The effect is 85 minutes of a reconstructed, colourised, moving film which shows the Warsaw Uprising with unprecedented realism.

The film was made as a tribute to the makers of the Uprising newsreels: Andrzej Ancut “Kier”, Stefan Bagiński “Stefan”, Stanisław Bala “Giza”, Roman Banach “Świerk”, Antoni Bohdziewicz “Wiktor”, Jerzy Gabryelski “Orski”, Wacław Feliks Kaźmierczak “Wacek”, Seweryn Kruszyński, Kazimierz Pyszkowski, Edward Szope, Ryszard Szope, Henryk Vlassak “Wania”, Antoni Wawrzyniak “Antonio”, Jerzy Zarzycki “Pik” and others.

The film’s producer and initiator is the Warsaw Rising Museum, the distributor – NEXT FILM. The executive producer of the film is Piotr C. Śliwowski, the Director of the Historic Section of the Warsaw Rising Museum. The author of the idea for the plot is Jan Komasa. The film was written by Joanna Pawluśkiewicz, Jan Ołdakowski and Piotr C. Śliwowski. For the needs of contemporary production, the dialogues were written by Joanna Pawluśkiewicz and Michał Sufin. The project also involved actors: Maciej Nawrocki, Michał Żurawski and Mirosław Zbrojewicz, who gave their voice to the main protagonists. Miriam Aleksandrowicz supervised dubbing directing. The cinematography materials were colourised by Piotr Sobociński Jr. The music was composed by Bartosz Chajdecki. Bartosz Putkiewicz is responsible for the full sound of the film, and Studio Produkcyjne Orka was responsible for the colourisation and stabilisation of the material.

The screening of „Warsaw Uprising” takes place within the commemorative section “Warsaw. Portrait of a City.”