Gdynia Film Festival: Digital Restoration with Our Support

More than 25 years after its premiere, the independent film I co wy na to, Gałuszko? by Maciej Cuske and Marcin Sauter will once again be screened for a festival audience, thanks to support from the Kujawy Pomorze Film Fund. The black-and-white crime comedy with elements of the absurd will be shown at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia. To mark this special return, the filmmakers are preparing a remastered version of the film.

The film was made as an independent production shot on 16 mm film and circulated among students, copied onto VHS tapes and shown at private screenings. In this way, it reached successive audiences and became part of the remarkably vibrant independent film scene of the time.

Years later, Joanna Łapińska, Director of the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia, decided to bring the film back to audiences. As Maciej Cuske recalls, she remembered I co wy na to, Gałuszko? from her student days. Her interest in the production led to the film being invited to this year’s festival.

For the filmmakers, this is a particularly special occasion. A film that for years existed primarily through VHS copies and in the memories of people associated with independent cinema will once again be seen on the big screen. Its presentation in Gdynia provided an opportunity to restore the original material. The filmmakers rescanned all the surviving footage from the original film stock and then rebuilt the film from scratch.

“We rescanned all the material from the film stock, and the film will be edited again from the beginning, making sure that, frame by frame, nothing in its content is changed,” says Maciej Cuske. “The main purpose of the restoration is to improve the quality of the image and sound. We are trying to bring out details from the black-and-white film that were not visible in the copy preserved a quarter of a century ago.”

Thanks to modern technology, the film can therefore regain some of its original quality and once again look and sound as well as the source materials allow.

As the director explains, the film is a black crime comedy with elements of the absurd, set in a sleepy fishing village on Lake Wdzydze. The tranquillity of the small community is disrupted by a series of mysterious events. A criminal mystery emerges in the local setting, giving the characters an opportunity to unleash their imagination and detective ambitions.

This year’s screening also has symbolic significance. More than 25 years later, the film by Bydgoszcz filmmakers is returning to a place where it had already attracted attention in the past. “Independent cinema had enormous strength in those days,” says Maciej Cuske. “It also helped give rise to a new generation of filmmakers following the collapse of communism in Poland. Independent films, including ‘I co wy na to, Gałuszko?’, were appreciated and were even screened in a separate section during the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia. So, after all these years, we are returning there.”

The filmmakers have announced that the Gdynia screening will not be the only opportunity to see the film again. Further screenings of I co wy na to, Gałuszko? are planned in the region in the near future. After a quarter of a century, the film may therefore begin a second life – this time not through successive VHS copies and private circulation, but thanks to a restored version, festival screens and audiences for whom the story of a mysterious fishing village on Lake Wdzydze will be an entirely new discovery.

Paweł Jankowski
Promotion Department

31 August 2026