Camerimage, the Polish festival devoted to cinematography, opened its 34th edition in Toruń on Saturday with a minute of silence for victims of a mass shooting in Kraków. Police said a man drove a car onto Kraków’s main square and fired at random people. The attack killed six and wounded at least 15, and investigators are still working to establish a motive. Authorities identified the attacker as a Polish citizen. Prime Minister Donald Tusk offered condolences to the families and praised the police officers who confronted the gunman.
The festival, which runs through November 14, then turned to its scheduled programme. Organizers honored Darren Aronofsky with the Award for Director, calling his work proof of cinema’s power when form becomes part of the story. Aronofsky built that body of work, from “Requiem for a Dream” to “Black Swan” and “The Whale,” largely with cinematographer Matthew Libatique.
The honor comes as Aronofsky experiments with AI through Primordial Soup, a studio that produces AI-driven video. Its output has drawn mixed reactions, though the festival’s tribute focused on his visual style.
AI also supplied the opening-night film. Luca Guadagnino presented “Artificial,” a drama about the creation of OpenAI, with Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman and Yura Borisov as chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. The cast also includes Monica Barbaro, Cooper Hoffman and Mark Rylance, and Simon Rich wrote the script. Guadagnino took the stage with the film’s cinematographer, Malik Hassan Sayeed, to discuss how they shot it.
Asked whether the legal risks of portraying real people shaped the production, Guadagnino said the team imposed one limit on itself: “The only constraints we gave ourselves were facts.” He added that the filmmakers chose not to dramatize events.
Camerimage’s own description casts the film as an examination of the ambitions of technology’s leaders and the responsibility that comes with building world-changing tools. Neon will release “Artificial” in the United States on December 25, and it reaches British cinemas on January 22, 2027. The pairing of an AI-skeptic debate and an AI-experimenting honoree gives this year’s festival an unusual theme. Camerimage has not said whether the shooting will change its programme.
