Kielce. The NURT anniversary festival is starting. Eleven nominations for Warner Bros. reporting Discovery

NURT is an independent festival which – as the organizers point out – draws attention to the fact that the traditional distinction between documentary films and television reportages is anachronistic. The organizer is the Kielce Cultural Center, and the originator and artistic director is Krzysztof Miklaszewski.

The competition screenings are accompanied by workshops, meetings, vernissages and special screenings, including nightly documentary film marathons.

Among the 34 nominated films, there were as many as 11 Warner Bros. productions. Discovery, which will be presented during nine competition shows. The following people will compete for the jury's recognition:

“What if the war ends tomorrow?” – dir. Martyna Wojciechowska and Hanna Jewsiewiecka.

They don't want to be called “victims”. They call themselves “survivors”. Iryna, Galina, Yuliia, Liudmyla survived Russian captivity. They survived torture and rape, and now they want to move on with their lives. They are not only heroines of Martyna Wojciechowska's film “What if the war ends tomorrow?”, but also heroines in real life. They decided to show their faces and speak loudly about the atrocities they suffered from the Russians. The testimony of survivors reminds us that the war in Ukraine It has been going on for nine years, because the Russians took Iryna from her home in 2014, Liudmyla was “arrested” in 2019, Yulia in 2021, and Galina in 2022. Thousands of Ukrainian women are still in Russian captivity. Their stories are proof that sexual violence is used as a weapon of war.

“Children for export” – dir. Magdalena Gwóźdź

18-year-old Marta, a pupil of a monastic orphanage, is sent to a Sicilian family. There she is forced to work and sexually assaulted. He runs away from Italian and tries to cope with everything that happened to her. Who sent children from Polish orphanages abroad? What did he get in return? Why was this practice never explained by Polish law enforcement authorities?

“Female investors – internet fraudsters” – dir. Mariusz Zieliński, cooperation Ewa Wąsek

Online ads, mysterious platforms and huge profits. The Internet is full of videos in which fraudsters impersonate famous people. How not to be deceived?

“Putin's circle. Secrets of Russian assets in Europe” – dir. Ewa Galica

Two years after Russia's attack on Ukraine and the introduction of sanctions against the richest Russian oligarchs, Ewa Galica from “Superwizjer” TVN decided to check whether they actually lost their villas and yachts. In the film “Putin's Circle. Secrets of Russian assets in Europe”, Galica talks to, among others, a Spanish prosecutor who has been prosecuting the Russian mafia for 20 years, risking his life, and is now conducting the most difficult case of his career. The film also stars American businessman Bill Browder, whom Putin expelled from Russiaand his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was murdered in a Russian prison. The head of the OCCRP team of journalists who found Russian assets worth almost $20 billion in Europe talks about his investigation. Ewa Galica, following the money taken out of Russia, reaches Tenerife, where she meets Russians involved in money laundering.

“People We Pass” – dir. Marcin Jakóbczyk, cooperation Tomasz Lusawa

Many Polish seniors live in extreme poverty. According to estimates, up to 300,000 retirees must choose whether to buy food, medicines or pay bills. – I sell rye soup on the street so as not to die of hunger – confesses Mrs. Ewa, one of the heroines of the reportage.

“Mother Behind Bars” – dir. Bartosz Żurawicz

25 children are in prison in Grudziądz. They are there from the first days of life. The oldest of them is Natan, he is three years old. His mother, with whom he is serving a sentence, was sent to a cell for robbery. What do departments look like where bars are combined with toys and colorful drawings hanging from the ceiling? What is childhood like in prison and why are Prison Service officers not allowed to wear uniforms in this department? Why does a family court allow a woman who has not yet learned how to change a diaper to be a mother, even though she has previously given birth to five children? And finally, does raising a child behind prison walls make a woman resocialize faster?

“Poland divided” – dir. Marcin Gutowski

Divided Poland, divided Poles. Political polarization has never been as deep in this century as it is now. This is shown by research and everyday, ordinary human observations. This is also shown by Marcin Gutowski's reporting experience. The “Black and White” reporter traveled to various places in Poland for many weeks. In cities and villages he met people of different generations, professions and political views. At the same time, together with experts, he analyzed the causes, anatomy and consequences of divisions in Polish society. The “Black and White” reporters also wanted to find out whether people who support extremely different political visions of Poland can still talk to each other.

“Polish Alcatraz” – dir. Agnieszka Madejska, Bartosz Józefiak

This is a reportage about what is happening at the construction site of Orlen's PLN 25 billion investment near Płock. Employees of the Olefiny complex told journalists about exploitation, inappropriate treatment and scandalous accommodation conditions.

“This is not a country for women” – dir. Aneta Regulska

Law and Justice at the end of the election campaign, it featured women as its banners. According to the narrative from the speeches Jarosław Kaczyński and other politicians, women in Poland have never had such a better life than in the last eight years, and women were hell under Tusk. And this is said by politicians of a party that, through its actions, forced women to give birth to terminally ill children, and those who opposed it on the streets beat them and sent nationalist militias to kill them. Politicians of the party that limited doctors' right to apply medical knowledge and caused patients to die in gynecological wards. Party politicians who do not hesitate to publicly ridicule and treat women disrespectfully. This is not a country for women – say the heroines of Aneta Regulska's reportage.

“Zaporozhye. In the middle of the offensive” – dir. Michał Przedlacki

In 2022, Putin's Russia attacked Ukraine on a full scale. Our eastern neighbors put up a superhuman effort to resist. Now the Ukrainian army has gone on the offensive to retake from the aggressor's hands the southern and eastern areas of the country, strewn with minefields and crossed by kilometers of Russian trenches. The next stage of the fight for freedom has begun. Despite the almost complete information blockade, Michał Przedlacki, a reporter from “Superwizjer”, was allowed to be at the forefront of the Ukrainian attack. He saw the price paid for wresting land from the occupier. During the fighting, he witnessed Ukrainian soldiers taking a Russian soldier prisoner. How did this story end?

“Betrayed by the State” – dir. Marek Osiecimski

One man – two processes. Wojciech Kwaśniak, former deputy head of the Polish Financial Supervision Authority, appears before courts in two roles. He was injured because in 2014 he was beaten almost to death in front of his home. This, as the court in Warsaw ruled in February, was related to the fact that he became interested in irregularities in SKOK Wołomin. Interestingly, or perhaps shockingly, the same government official is the defendant in the second trial. Prosecutor's office in times Zbigniew Ziobro and Bogdan Święczkowski accused him of being a member of a criminal group and, through his action or rather omission, allowed money to be withdrawn from SKOK. The same one who began to control, and almost paid for this control with his own life.

*** The final gala will take place on Friday, November 22.