Over forty documentaries, features as well as short and animated films by directors from Poland, Israel, France, Russia, the Czech Republic and Britain are on the programme of the ‘Jewish Motifs’ Film Festival which has opened in Warsaw.

The films focus on various aspects of the history, national and cultural identity and tradition of the Jewish nation.

The programme includes such highly-acclaimed films as Pizza in Auschwitz by the Israeli director Moshe Zimerman, a moving account of a visit to Auschwitz by its former prisoner taking his children around the camp. The film won the top award at the prestigious IDFA Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam. An Ordinary March by the Polish director Maria Zmarz-Koczanowicz probes into what lay behind social support for the anti-Semitic actions of the communist authorities in Poland in March 1968. The Bałuty Ghetto is a joint Polish-Czech production about the plight of Czech Jews deported to the Jewish Ghetto in the Łódź district of Bałuty.

The festival, now in its seventh edition, ends on Sunday. (mk)