The 2023 Seattle International Film Festival is at our doors. This year, SIFF will show two Polish films, “Pianoforte” and “Filip” and also an American movie “Late Bloomers” with a Polish immigrant as one of the main characters.

“Filip“, directed by Michal Kwiecinski (“Tomorrow We’re Going To The Movies” 2007, “Extras” 2006), breaks every film cliché about the Nazi era and the Holocaust. It is an unexpectedly sharp, jagged character study about a handsome young Polish Jew pretending to be French who works at a luxury hotel in Nazi-era Frankfurt. In a wartime Frankfurt where horrors and trauma don’t exclude the ecstasies and intrigues of the young, Filip (Eryk Kulm), a waiter at the city’s top hotel, is a clandestine Jewish refugee from the Warsaw Ghetto whose life depends on the ruse that he is French. For foreign workers in race-mad Germany, fraternizing with Aryan women is punishable by death—and confident, seductive Filip violates this prohibition repeatedly, passionately, and brazenly. Luxe lighting, expressive camerawork, and period-perfect costumes offer a bracing contrast with an unexpectedly sharp character study of a man caught between the quest for survival and the hunger for action, intimacy, and self. As the story darkens, the question grows more pressing—what is truly at stake for Filip: pleasure, survival, or revenge?

“Filip” won the Best Cinematography award at the 2022 Gdynia Film Festival.

The film will be shown at SIFF Film Center on May 14 at 2 pm and at Ark Lodge Cinemas on May 17th 8:45 pm.

Internet screening is also available between May 21 and 28, 2023.

More: movie info and tickets at SIFF

by AK