Wilkolak
Young survivors of a German concentration camp are confronted with new atrocities in a war thriller about survival.
It’s the summer of 1945. Germany is in ruins and the chaos is enormous. In the midst of this all, the surviving prisoners of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp are freed, including a group of children who are housed in an abandoned villa. Twenty-year-old Hanka, a former prisoner herself, becomes their guardian. After the atrocities of the camp, the protagonists slowly begin to regain what is left of their childhood but the horror returns quickly. Aggressive German camp dogs, released by fleeing SS officers, roam the forest in search of food. And then there are the German and Russian soldiers, hiding in the woods, also making the area unsafe.
In his second feature film, for which he wrote the screenplay himself, Polish director Adrian Panek mixes war drama with coming-of-age and horror elements. It has earned him seven international film prizes so far.