section Feature Film Competition

Filip

  • Michał Kwieciński
  • PL
  • 2022
  • 125 min

Filip wants only one thing: to survive and live. The Warsaw Jew escapes the ghetto, poses as a Frenchman and works as a forced laborer in a Frankfurt hotel. He picks up women together with his best friend Pierre. But the cover threatens to be blown. This fast-paced drama is inspired by the life of Leopold Tyrmand.

Filip is young, happy and wants to marry his fiancée, Sara. And yet in the Warsaw Ghetto of 1941 it’s impossible to make long-term plans. Sara and Filip's parents are brutally murdered by the Nazis. Two years later we find Filip in Frankfurt am Main. With the help of the smuggler Staszek he ends up in a luxury hotel where, alongside fellow European forced laborers, he is required to work as a waiter. In Frankfurt he passes as French. In his free time, he and his Belgian friend Pierre pick up German women in order to, in his words, make “whores” of them. He keeps his feelings to himself; he only wants one thing: to survive. And yet when Filip meets an old Polish friend, his true identity is at risk of being exposed.
Michał Kwieciński's film tells a quite incredible story, one inspired by the life of Polish Jewish author Leopold Tyrmand. Even in a life that was luxurious by wartime standards, dangers lurk everywhere, with the foreign hotel employees constantly exposed to the arbitrariness and brutality of the Gestapo. This suspense-packed film from Poland, in which Eryk Kulm stands out with his outstanding performance in the role of Filip, speaks of how young people continue to yearn to love, dance and listen to jazz, even under the most adverse of circumstances.
Text: Kira Taszman
English: Peter Rickerby


At all screenings, except Sat,17.6., lead actor Eryk Kulm Jr will be present for a film talk after the film.


watch trailer

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Credits

original title Filip

international title Filip

german title Filip

JFBB section Feature Film Competition

  • director Michał Kwieciński

country/countries PL

year 2022

duration 125 min


Portrait of Michał Kwieciński

Michał Kwieciński

BIO Producer, director, founder of Akson Studio, holder of a doctoral degree in chemical sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences, graduate of the Directing and Drama Department of the State Higher School of Theatre in Warsaw, awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta and the Gloria Artis Medal for Merit to Culture, Member of the Polish Film Academy and the European Film Academy (EFA).