The eleventh Polish Film Festival has kicked off in Los Angeles.

The annual celebration of Polish cinema will feature screenings of up to 30 productions made in the country, including Jan Hryniak’s Trick and the recent Oscar-nominated documentary, Bartosz Konopko’s Rabbit à la Berlin.

The festival is overshadowed by the recent air crash in Smolensk, as the event was to be inaugurated by the late deputy speaker of the senate, Krystyna Bochenek, who died in the accident.

The organizers have decided to pay respects to all the 96 people who perished in the Smolensk air tragedy, by showing Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn, a film centered on the murder of up to 22,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest by the Soviet secret police in 1940. Many top state officials traveling to Smolensk onboard the plane were on their way to observances commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre.

This year, participants of the festival will not have the chance to meet with Polish actors and film directors – a year-by-year highlight of the event. The guests from Poland have had to cancel their trips due air traffic disruptions caused by the Icelandic volcanic ash over Europe.

The festival is expected to draw an audience of 3,500, which is a reasonable outcome, considering the high competition in Los Angeles, which is currently hosting eight festivals, says head of the Polish Film Festival Waldemar Juszkiewicz. The event winds up on 2 May. (ab)