The Conrad Festival is not just about literature – it is also a time of intensive participation in culture. Accompanying events will allow a look at the invited artists and festival topics from a different perspective, they will add variety, and serve as entertainment and education.. The programme will include film screenings, exhibitions and programming directed primarily towards children.

For film lovers, the Festival organisers have chosen a variety of possibilities. On Monday, the film Errant Maps will be presented, telling the story of the journey of the most famous knight errant in Europe’s history – Don Quixote – whose adventures were recorded by Cervantes. The screening will be accompanied by a meeting with Magdalena Barbaruk and Wojciech Charchalis, hosted by Grzegorz Olszański. On Tuesday, Festival participants will have an opportunity to see Under the Skin – a film based on a novel by Michel Faber, who will also meet with readers on that day. On Wednesday, the cult 1990 Polish film Farewell to Autumn will be screened, starring Jan Peszek as Count Jędruś Łohoyski, and on Thursday, another Polish production, Ubu King, directed by Piotr Szulkin with Jan Peszek as Ubu. On Friday, we will see The Hours, directed by Stephen Daldry – an adaptation of the novel by Michael Cunningham, who will provide an introduction before the screening. On Saturday, the film Son of Saul, starring Géza Göhrig, who will also introduce the film. It looks like it will be an intense time for film lovers and everyone who would like to get to know the festival guests and their work.

Many festival events will be held in exhibition spaces. Participants of the Festival will have an opportunity to visit the Museum of the History of Photography, the Art Bunker Contemporary Art Gallery, the Gallery of the Faculty of Art of the Pedagogical University and the club-café Lokator. At the International Cultural Centre, there will be a talk about Professor Rudolf Weidl, a famous biologist, who conducted his studies in Krakow after World War II, and at the National Museum, a meeting with Krisztina Tóth, one of the best contemporary Hungarian writers will be hosted by Joanna Bator.

During the Festival, there will be plenty of attractions for children. Meetings designed for the youngest participants will focus on good and interesting books, published with great care. They will go beyond books, however, inspiring experimentation and individual discoveries. A rich workshop offer awaits the children – from typographic activities, through landscape architecture workshops, to classes on drawing emotions.

Participants will create a model of a housing estate and a green city, during art workshops with Ola and Daniel Mizeliński, they will set out on an incredible journey deep into the Earth and design diving suits. Guido Van Genechten will show children how to express a whole range of emotions using lines and colours. During the optical illusion workshops at the Museum of the History of Photography, they will find out about the construction of the eye, and during meetings with Adam Wajrak and Tomasz Samojlik, they will learn more about the Białowieża Forest. There will also be a premiere of a play for children, The Devil Never Sleeps, inspired by the book The Devil and Company by Agnieszka Taborska. Children’s events require prior registration through the website of the Children’s Literature Festival – a partner of the Conrad Festival (www.fldd.pl). Reservations can be made starting today at 12:00 PM.

CHECK THE PROGRAMME

There will be plenty of variety during this year’s Festival – everyone will surely find something to enjoy. The organisers of the event – the City of Krakow, the Krakow Festival Office and the Tygodnik Powszechny Foundation – encourage you to familiarise yourselves with the programme and choose your own path through the Conrad Festival.

A landscape is more than a place. Sometimes the memory of a place, the emotions and feelings it evokes can be more important than the place itself. All of it brings us to the discussion of the internal landscape, woven from memories and imaginations. There are landscapes which are hard to remove from memory, there are some that evoke the feeling of safety and closeness. Thursday will be devoted to landscapes, and the audience will see the meetings with Géza Röhrig, Szczepan Twardoch, Sofia Andrukhovych and Conrad Award nominees.

“I can say that I found my identity in Auschwitz. This place has plotted a path in my life, a path which I constantly follow”, said Géza Röhrig, who played the leading role in The Son of Saul. Röhrig is also a poet and the former frontman of the underground band Huckleberry. In the Academy Award-winning Son of Saul, he played the role of a Sonderkommando member. Before that, he had been interested in concentration camps for a long time, also because of personal reasons, since his grandfather’s entire family perished in Auschwitz. He visited Oświęcim for the first time as a teenager. During Conrad Festival, in a discussion with Grzegorz Jankowicz, we are going to see him primarily as a writer, author of Rabbi’s Plucked Parrot, a collection of made-up Chassidic stories.

The literature written by reporters often refers to the connection between the landscape and human experiences. Wojciech Górecki, a journalist, historian, reporter and expert on subjects related to the Caucasus, author of three books about the peninsula: Planet Caucasus, Toast to the Ancestors and Abkhazia, will tell us the stories of his long journeys. Talking with him will be Anna Żamejć, journalist and correspondent, another expert on Caucasus.

Another meeting, titled “People from the Province”, will be devoted to landscapes which are closer to us, yet still mostly unknown. In a discussion with Katarzyna Trzeciak, Radka Franczak, Andrzej Muszyński and Maciej Płaza, authors of books connected in a special way to the topic of Polish countryside will answer questions about terra incognita and think about the reasons why the Polish province is constantly infantilised and simplified in collective narratives.

The subjects connected with science and biology, seemingly devoid of any literary potential are always a, challenge for literates. Urszula Zajączkowska decided to take up the challenge by writing Atoms, a book nominated for the Wrocław Silesius Poetry Award in 2015 as a debut of the year, shattering the general belief that a scientific approach to the world is incompatible with literary sensitiveness. During a meeting with Stanisław Łubieński – author of reports, essayist and amateur ornithologist – and Urszula Zajączkowska, Michał Sowiński will learn how science complements literature.

Late in the evening, the audience will be in for Rumble – a meeting with Szczepan Twardoch, whose latest novel – The King – will present the complex, multifaceted and unknown landscape of Warsaw in 1937. The meeting will be hosted by Szymon Kloska.

Known and unknown, close and strange. The landscapes build our imagination and become a matter transformed by literature, becoming a point of reference for human consciousness, very often being its artistic reflection. Join the City of Krakow, Krakow Festival Office and Tygodnik Powszechny Foundation for the festival meetings, exploring this aspect of literature.

More at www.conradfestival.pl