The festival runs until November 9 at the Atlantic and Amondo cinemas and the Andrzej Wajda Film Culture Centre in the Polish capital.
Its competitions include eight feature films, nine documentaries and 24 short films selected from around 150 submissions.
"Every year, we wonder whether Ukrainian cinema will survive the war, and yet films are still being made, and not only about the war," said festival director Beata Bierońska-Lach.
Despite difficult conditions, including bombardments and air-raid alerts, filmmakers are producing not only war films but also comedies, musicals and stories about love, family and everyday life.
The organisers want Polish audiences to discover Ukraine through its cinema, not only through news from the front.
Ukrainian embassy adviser Vitalii Bilyi thanked the organisers for promoting Ukrainian cinema and highlighted interest in the festival in Poland, Polish solidarity with Ukraine and joint film productions.
Ukrainian Film Academy head Pylyp Illienko said the resistance of Ukrainian soldiers enabled filmmakers to continue working.
Polish Film Academy head Dariusz Jabłoński reaffirmed the Polish film industry's support for Ukrainian filmmakers and called for joint efforts to tell the world about their experiences.
The festival opened with Demons, the second feature film by Natalka Vorozhbyt following Bad Roads. Set in the turbulent years after 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.
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 features Dovzhenko: First Look, about the early career of Ukrainian filmmaker Oleksandr Dovzhenko, and I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming, directed by Isabelle Stever and written by Anna Melikyan, about a young queer couple dealing with one partner's gender transition and the Russian invasion.
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.
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 present feature films, documentaries and shorts, 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 closing gala is scheduled for November 8, when the Polish-Ukrainian band Dagadana will provide a live musical accompaniment to 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.
Public broadcaster Polish Radio is a media partner of the event.
The full programme is available at ukrainaff.com.
(sp/gs)
Source: PRdZ/PRdU, PAP