Poland’s Cameraimage film festival was established 31 years ago as specialty event focused on cinematography. The Toruń fest has expanded in recent years but has retained its essence as pure celebration of the art of filmmaking, craftsmanship behind the camera — cinematographers, directors production designers.

“The reason people keep coming back here to Poland is that they get to talk about art; it’s not another trade show or a festival with red carpets every night,” says Camerimage director Kazimierz Suwała, who estimates that the festival welcomes between 700 and 800 cinematographer guests over its week-long run every November. “You come here to meet your fellow artisans. We have DPs who come from LA and joke that they live just next door to each other, but it’s easier to get together to actually talk about filmmaking here at Camerimage.”

This year’s Camerimage festival runs Nov. 16-23 in the medieval Polish city of Toruń, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Suwała — Żydowicz’s second in command — discusses the vision behind this year’s edition and how the festival plans to address the issues raised by the controversy.

It’s exciting to see more filmmakers coming back to classical formats — that they still have such legacy — because they are as good as anything else available to us today. What we always emphasize here is that all forms of cinematographic technology are simply tools, or colors available to the painter — whether it’s 35mm or generative AI.

There is a lot of anxiety around AI — some are worried that it will eventually enable us to replace everything in the filmmaking process, including DPs, actors, set designers, etc. — so we are planning to hold a discussion at the festival about whether this technology is the beginning of the end or simply the latest tool to empower filmmakers. These kinds of conversations have always been an important part of our event.

I know it has become divisive. Some felt we were doing it for promotional reasons and that it was inappropriate to screen a film that resulted in death. But for us, the motivation was very simple. Halyna had a strong connection to this festival. She attended several times. And we were contacted by her friends, who told us that before shooting even began on Rust, she told them that the film was very important to her and it was her dream to screen it at Camerimage. So the screening is only about that: fulfilling her wish of showing her film at the festival. Halyna’s mother, who is Ukrainian, is going to attend the screening if she’s able to leave her country, but it’s not easy right now because of the war. Some have suggested we are holding this screening simply to generate attention for the festival, but we don’t need that kind of attention. We didn’t invite Alec Baldwin, and we never considered doing so. That would be too distracting. What this is about is honoring Halyna’s dreams for her work.

We have to change. To move forward, the next step is to meet during the festival and explore ways to address the changes necessary at our festival and in the film business overall. Festivals have important role to play, but we are the last step — inclusivity needs to begin during project development and carry through the entire journey of the filmmaking process. We are still trying to put something together, but my hope is that we can hold an open seminar near the end of the week about the future of film festivals — and that inclusivity and diversity will be central topic. In the statemen by Women in Cinematography and other filmmakers, there have been suggestions of detailed steps we could take to improve inclusivity at Camerimage.