The Pigeon International Film Festival is a relatively new event on the world’s festival map, but its organisers are very ambitious and open to the international market. There is room for a variety of genres and forms, and there is no shying away from experimentation, but also from films that are already known and loved – and from all over the world – albeit with a focus on the selected guest country. This year, the organisers focused on a retrospective of Polish and Iranian cinema.
Indeed, a lot of great Polish productions made it into the program. Among them the award-winning animated shorts – Prince in a Pastry Shop by Katarzyna Agopsowicz and We Have One Heart by Katarzyna Warzecha.
Prince in a Pastry Shop is a facetious tale about happiness. “Happiness is nothing but trouble”, says Not-So-Little Prince, producing numerous examples of these troubles. His interlocutor is Prickly Pear – the embodiment of carelessness, frivolity, simple joie de vivre, but at the same time a lively, intelligent mind capable of driving the Prince into a corner in conversation. This philosophical fable about a couple eating cakes in a café touches upon fundamental issues close to everyone – the transience of happiness, the fact that we do not always know how to notice it, not to mention how to experience it to the fullest.
In turn, Warzecha’s film is an intimate animated documentary. After his mother’s death, Adam finds letters exchanged years ago by his parents: a Polish woman and a Kurd living in Iraq. It creates an opportunity for Adam to learn more about his father, whom he has never met. The combination of animated drawings and archival materials takes us back almost 40 years into the past, lets us feel the emotions of lovers living in different parts of the world and discover an extraordinary family secret.
It is worth taking a look at the festival website for the program of the past edition.