After going to the 12^th T-Mobile New Horizons Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland three years in a row I can vouch this super charged festival has grown in stature each year.

Philippe Mora is a film director and film historian living in West Hollywood. Photo by WeHo News.

I admit that I’m biased: I love the city, the festival and the people, and they like my films. My grandparents got married here in 1909. With over 469 movies from 52 countries, including over a 160 Polish premieres, the creativity in the international film world hits you in the face.

Over 108,000 viewers watched the screenings. Living in LA where “creativity” is often considered a dangerous word in the studio corridors, finding a place where it is celebrated is like coming up from a deep dive.

Contradictions and hypocrisy abound: some of corporate Hollywood still thinks people who drink a glass of wine with lunch are alcoholics, while some executives go and snort cocaine privately.

Conversely, in Europe they can think there is something wrong with you if you don’t have a glass of wine with lunch.

It’s a cliché now to say that current Hollywood studios are mostly run by generic types, most of whom have never made a film. The days of filmmakers at the top have almost gone or fossilized.

It is reflected in the comical parade of men in tights and masks, sequels, prequels, reboots, franchise wannabes and just plain crap that decorate the multiplexes. Philistinism has no shame by definition.

A clever recent “Op-Doc” in the New York Times makes the point.

New Horizons Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland has grown in stature each year.

Back to Wroclaw: The festival is an ever expanding 10 day explosion of international cinema, the brainchild of Roman Gutek, a film visionary for decades, now buttressed by film connoisseur and Artistic Director Joanna Lapinska. Gutek, who navigated through Communist censorship to bring modern cinema to Poland even in totalitarian times, is a master cultural diplomat.

In Communist times as now, films would show up at the last minute for festivals, and he recalls how the Communist authorities would warn him: Just be careful about what you show!

He survived that high wire act and this festival represents freedom of expression with gusto. Gutek and Lapinska embrace the most far out and the most classical cinema in the world today.

More than that, the festival celebrates the avant-garde in cinema. Basically, without the avant-garde cinema stops its evolution. It is the cultural equivalent of shock and awe, but in Burbank they think it might be French for potato salad.

A distributor once asked me: “Fill-I-pee, what John Ray do you work in?” It seems the apparent dumbing, numbing down of some America has permeated Hollywood, reflected in mostly boorish violent television, moronic movies and general confusion.

Things I had to cut out of my film The Beast Within (United Artists/MGM 1980) to get an R rating are now standard fare on daytime TV. Anyone who does not think movies can encourage violence should see the Nazi movies Jud Suss (1940) and Der Ewige Jude (1940), brought to you by the producers of the Holocaust.

New Horizons Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland has grown in stature each year.

At New Horizons you get a bracing dose of progressive cinema old and new. This year featured a retrospective of iconoclastic Dusan Makavejev, the groundbreaking Serbian director, who was exiled from Communist Yugoslavia for his incendiary movie mix of sex and politics in the 60’s and 70’s.

Academy Award winning Producer Jeremy Thomas said that festival directors are now more important than studio heads in the matrix of world cinema. 

UK film festival maven Xavier Rashid named New Horizons one of the 100 “essential” festivals. Inspired by a respect for the creative artisans of cinema like actors, directors and writers the Festival searches out international innovative cinema.

Respect for creatives? Almost an alien concept in Hollywood now. Many thousands flock to Wroclaw for this event, a city nominated as the creative capital of Europe for 2016. Formerly Breslau, Germany, the Allies gave the city to Poland in 1945 as real and symbolic reparations for the Nazi atrocities against Poland.

Sore losers or short memories still puzzlingly put “Breslau” up at the airport terminals in Germany for the Wroclaw connecting flights.

Gutek also initiated the American Film Festival in Wroclaw three years ago to celebrate American cinema and auteurs, past and present. It is typical of the disconnect in Hollywood that no American film festival actually celebrates American cinema past and present, with the cinephile enthusiasm of…Wroclaw.

New Horizons Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland has grown in stature each year.

It’s kind of crazy but apparently you get along better in Hollywood these days pretending you are a cultural hick.

A successful writer director, a friend of mine, proudly told me: “I don’t have an artistic bone in my body!”

This could be a hangover from Goldwyn’s “If you have a message, send it by Western Union.” 

The only similar festival adoring American movies is in Deauville, France. American auteurs—what a concept?

On the pecking order of who to grovel to in Hollywood now, directors are about in the same league as a greeter in a mediocre restaurant.

The problem is many executives here don’t know what directors do. In many places around the world, they do know, and directors are celebrated, like in Wroclaw.

Last year the American Film Festival was host to nine Billy Wilder films and the work of Joe Swanberg, of the Mumblecore indie film movement of the early 2000’s.

Last week I saw Gutek in Wroclaw and told him I was going to write a piece about the festival. I asked him did he have a message for readers in the heart of Hollywood. Humbly he said, yes, “please tell them about my new American Film Festival.” 

Hollywood in a fashion is still Rome for movies, with arrogant centurions, slaves and gladiators. Its message is far reaching, but as it decays the films are embarrassing compared to the gutsier times.

People like Gutek celebrate the great American film artists and remind us magic can happen again…and even that a glass of wine is OK with lunch.

Philippe Mora is a French-born Australian film director who has lived in West Hollywood for over 30 years.

See "Swastika" Filmmaker on WeHo, the Berlin Wall & Nazis

He writes a regular opinion column for Australia's Sydney Morning Herald.

His credits include: Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? (1975), Mad Dog Morgan (1976), The Beast Within (1982), The Return of Captain Invincible (1983), A Breed Apart (1984), Howling II: Stirba - Werewolf Bitch (1985), Death of a Soldier (1986), Howling III (1987), Communion (1989), Art Deco Detective (1994), Precious Find (1996), Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills (1997),