Ari Folman will introduce his Cannes competition title Waltz With Bashir to Polish audiences at the opening ceremony of the 24th Warsaw Film Festival Oct 10. The festival concludes Oct 19 with Sergey Dvortsevov's Un Certain Regard winner Tulpan.

The festival's international Warsaw Competition features 15 films. Dejan Zecevic's Serbian-Hungarian co-production The Fourth Man will see its international premiere in the selection. Malgorzata Szumowska's 33 Scenes From Life, a Polish-German co-production which won the Special Jury Prize at Locarno, represents local film in the contest. Also in the international competition are Thomas McCarthy's The Visitor and the US-Norway co-production Red, directed by Trygve Allister Diesen and Lucky McKee.

Producer Jim Stark (Factotum, Mystery Train) will serve on the Warsaw Competition jury, along with international director Gianfranco Quattrini, Estonian author and scriptwriter Kadri Kousaar (Magnus), Polish producer Jerzy Kapuscinski and Alexander Yanakiev, director of the Institute of Art Studies at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The festival's juries have no chairmen.

The 1-2 Competition of first and second films includes two world premieres: Chinese entry Jinghua, from director Li Shuai, and Carmo, a Brazilian-Spanish-Polish co-production directed by Murilo Pasta.

The Free Spirit competition of independent and so-called rebellious films features the world premiere Grzegorz Lipiec's film Horizontal 8 as well as Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer and Montreal winner Ben X, among others.

'This year's programme includes over a hundred new film premieres from all over the world which - with just a few exceptions - have yet to find a Polish distributor', festival director Stefan Laudyn said in a statement issued to the press.

The festival also hosts the CentEast Market Warsaw (Oct 15-19), which features projects from throughout Eastern Europe and screenings of select Polish films.