The festival is the biggest event in Poland devoted entirely to Ukrainian cinema.
The programme includes Traces, Ukraine's Oscar contender, award-winning films and documentaries exploring the impact of Russia's war on Ukrainian society, identity and the environment.
The main competition features eight feature films, nine documentaries and 23 short films, selected from around 150 submissions. A jury of Polish and Ukrainian filmmakers will select the winners, who will receive cash prizes.
The festival opens with Demons, the second feature film by Natalka Vorozhbyt after Bad Roads. Set in the turbulent years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it follows Nina, a woman from Poltava who takes in a homeless Russian wanderer claiming to be a writer.
The film premiered in the Cineasti del Presente competition at the Locarno Film Festival.
Demons features the final leading role in a film for Rusłana Pysanka, the Ukrainian actress and presenter known to Polish audiences for playing Horpyna in Jerzy Hoffman's With Fire and Sword. She died in July 2022 while the film was still being made, but the production was completed in line with the director's original vision.
Valentyn Vasyanovych's For Victory! is among the main competition titles. It won the Platform Award in Toronto, the Golden Duke for best Ukrainian feature film and the FIPRESCI award at the Odesa Film Festival.
The programme also includes Atlantis, which won the main prize at the festival's fourth edition.
Dovzhenko: The First Look, directed by Kostiantyn Konovalov, explores the early career of filmmaker Oleksandr Dovzhenko and his search for an artistic voice within Soviet cinema.
The programme also features stories about experiences less commonly represented in accounts of the war.
I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming, directed by Isabelle Stever and based on a screenplay by Anna Melikova, follows a young queer couple, Ola and Oleh, as Oleh undergoes gender transition and Russia's invasion increasingly affects their lives. German filmmaker Tom Tykwer is among the producers.
The documentary competition includes Traces, Ukraine's Oscar contender, which won the Panorama Audience Award at the Berlinale and the Grand Jury Documentary Award at Movies That Matter in The Hague.
Other titles include Silent Flood, which won awards in Amsterdam and at the Kraków Film Festival, and Militantropos, which premiered in the Directors' Fortnight section at Cannes.
The war's environmental impact is explored in Divia, winner of the Green Dog competition at WATCH DOCS.
The Veterans' Theatre, directed by Yulia Bolshynska, follows Ukrainian veterans, soldiers, medics and volunteers preparing a performance of Eneida, based on the classic poem by Ivan Kotliarevsky. The film was named best documentary at the Cine Paris festival.
The short-film competition includes Rotation, directed by Maryna Er Horbach, whose film Klondike represented Ukraine in the 2023 Oscar race.
This year's festival also expands to Belarusian cinema. A section called the Belarusian Film Corps, organised with Bulbamovie, will feature fiction, documentary and short films, including Yuri Semashko's The Swan Song of Fyodor Ozerov, which screened at the Berlinale and received an award from the Tagesspiegel readers' jury.
A programme for children will include animated films, activities and a performance.
The festival will run until November 9 at Atlantic Cinema, Amondo Cinema and the Andrzej Wajda Film Culture Centre in the Polish capital.
The closing gala is scheduled for 8 November, when the Polish-Ukrainian band Dagadana will perform live music to accompany Oleksandr Dovzhenko's silent film The Diplomatic Courier's Bag.
The festival will also visit 12 Polish cities in November and December, including Wrocław, Kraków, Poznań, Lublin, Przemyśl, Łódź and Gdańsk.
Tickets and passes for Warsaw screenings are on sale. The full programme is available at www.ukrainaff.com.
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Source: PAP