Cinema Vérité to host Polish Hanna Polak

The 14th Cinema Vérité, Iran’s major international festival for documentary films, has scheduled to host a virtual master class by Polish filmmaker Hanna Polak.

The Documentary and Experimental Film Center, organizer of the Cinema Vérité, announced Polak will talk on the topic of “making a documentary in a crisis” at the master class.

The 53-year-old filmmaker, who is also a director of photography, was nominated at the 2005 edition of the Academy Awards for her documentary ‘The Children of Leningradsky’.

She graduated from the cinematography department of the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. She has also established a foundation to help homeless children in Russia.

Thanks to the children of Leningradsky station, she met the protagonists of her next film, ‘Something Better to Come’, which was the most awarded Polish film in 2015. It tells the story of the inhabitants of the biggest rubbish dump in Europe.

Polak’s ‘Something Better to Come’ was screened at the 9th edition of the Cinema Vérité in 2015.

This year, the Cinema Vérité has dedicated a special section to screen documentaries on the COVID-19 pandemic.

The organizers of the festival have received more than 130 submissions on the pandemic in the COVID-19 category.

The four top selected works in this category will be honored at the closing ceremony, while the international section of the festival is non-competitive this year.

The 14th edition of the Cinema Vérité will be held online due to the coronavirus outbreak in December 2020.

MG/MG