The 42nd edition of the Warsaw International Film Festival is wrapping up on Sunday after its winners were unveiled during a Saturday night awards ceremony. The top honor, the Warsaw Grand Prix in the international competition of the Polish fest, went to Grzegorz Dębowski for What Belongs to Others.
The film follows a Polish burglar who assumes the identity of a dead stranger’s girlfriend, with unexpected results. The jury said it awarded the top honor to the film “for its precise and delicate storytelling, its exceptional performances, and its complex portrait, devoid of judgment, of a flawed and elusive woman who undergoes a transformation as she slips into a stranger’s identity and life, and therein finds the possibility of her own.”
The Warsaw best director award went to Chinese filmmaker Cai Chengjie for Suzhou Quartet, which the jury lauded as “an original and ambitious concept brought to life through striking cinematography and daring experimentation with narrative form.” The “visually captivating and richly layered meditation on life and mortality” tells the story of four people who meet by chance in a small noodle shop, only to find they are long-lost acquaintances.
Meanwhile, the Warsaw festival also gave a special jury award to Maria Dębska for her performance in Through the Wall, directed by Maciej Sobieszczański, about two young political prisoners during the Stalinist terror in Poland who fall in love
The jury lauded the actress for “a remarkably precise and emotionally truthful portrayal [and] for creating a complex character with great sensitivity and without exaggeration.” It added that the honor is also “for a role that stays with the audience long after the film ends.”
Meanwhile, a special jury mention went to Bloody Men, directed by Jens Sjögren, with the jury saying it “captures with remarkable authenticity the chaos caused by domestic violence and the challenges faced by children growing up with a single parent struggling with personal difficulties and making decisions that repeatedly put the entire family’s safety at risk.”
Also at Warsaw, the main award in the Competition 1–2 program, dedicated to directors’ first and second fiction features, went to Lorin Terezi’s Agia. “It is rare for a fiction feature debut to feel so complete,” the jury said. “Its structure recalls a Greek tragedy, offering a glimpse into a disappearing world. A subtle story of a young woman rebelling against patriarchal tradition and a world in which family honor is valued above life itself. Agia wants to live on her own terms and make her own decisions.”
A special mention in the 1-2 program went to Urša Menart’s Everything That’s Wrong With You, “a touching portrait of a young woman desperately trying to find an honest human connection in a world full of emotional uncertainty, white lies and cheating German boyfriends.”
The Warsaw documentary competition saw the award go to Jonas Spriestersbach’s Meanwhile in Namibia, which explores how the German government, instead of paying reparations for its occupation of Namibia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, offers development cooperation programs. “The director demonstrates an amazing ability to frame reality with extraordinary precision, letting the images slowly unfold and reveal the unsettling and absurd contradictions of human behavior,” the jury said. “The film addresses moral complexity without simple judgments, allowing viewers to construct their own meaning.”
María Molina Peiró’s Like Any Other Mortal received a special mention in the doc program.
Check out further Warsaw film festival awards below.
Short Grand Prix
Meteorit, directed by Elisabeth Werchosin
Best Live-Action Short Film Award
Meteorit, directed by Elisabeth Werchosin
Best Animated Short Film Award
Knowing Gaze, directed by Dylan Glynn
Best Documentary Short Film Award
A Letter to Home, directed by Sina Aghazadeh
Ecumenical Jury Award
The Child, directed by Linda Olte
FIPRESCI Award
Through the Wall, directed by Maciej Sobieszczański
NETPAC Award
Mentor, directed by Keisuke Yoshida
Young FIPRESCI Award
Lover, Not a Fighter, directed by Martina Buchelová
Polish Film Institute Award
Josephine, directed by Beth de Araújo
Orlen Award for the Best Polish Short Film
Dying of the Young Deer, directed by Angelika Cygal
Speakers’ Avenue Film School Award
The Death of a Bird, directed by Felipe Sánchez García
KIPA Award for Best Producing Debut from the Polish Producers Alliance (KIPA)
Dagmara Piasecka for Pixie. The New Beginning