John McClane, Frank Serpico, Dirty Harry, cadet Mahoney or Poland’s own Franz Maurer. On the other side of the barricade: Tony Montana, the Corleone family, and finally the "colourful" gentlemen in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Who doesn't know these characters? Over the years, police and gangster movies have created characters who have stimulated the imagination of viewers all over the world. From petty thieves to characters at the forefront of criminal empires. From inconspicuous cadets in police academies to hard-working officers of the law. Their images might have been very different—romantic, realistic, or created with a sense of irony. What the films representing these two genres have in common is the fact that they often, as if coincidentally, reflected the social problems of the reality they portrayed. The attractiveness of the topic is best seen in the gallery of filmmakers that have tackled it, with Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet, Brian De Palma, Michael Mann and Don Siegel among them. In this special section of the Mastercard OFF CAMERA festival we want to take a look at the evolution of how police officers and gangsters are portrayed in both feature films and documentaries. We will also consider whether there is room for gender equality in these traditionally "male" genres. Let the chase begin!

The title, taken from the hit song, is a pretext and a starting point for us to reflect on the many faces of contemporary masculinity. We will not consider it in terms of marriage potential, or by duplicating the stereotypical categories used for centuries to assess and evaluate men, or to exclude those who don’t conform to the archetypal macho image. Instead, we have decided to look at alternative models of masculinity. At a time defined by ubiquitous discussions about masculinity in crisis, as well as a transformation of the social and cultural reality and the blurring of previously rigid gender binaries, this topic is extremely important. And most importantly, it inspires filmmakers to ask a variety of questions and search for answers about the role, function and place of men on the modern moral map. It’s changing before our very eyes as a result of the "#metoo" and "#timesup" movements, just to name a few, as well as the many social and political scandals exposing the toxicity of traditionally understood masculinity. Films presented in this special themed section of this year’s Mastercard OFF CAMERA festival don’t claim to create a single, universal model of masculinity. On the contrary, they show men who differ in race, class, sexuality and gender position. At the same time, they invite the audience to take a fascinating and sometimes surprising journey, regardless of expectations or accepted cultural norms.

Reality definitely sometimes "bites," to refer to the original title of Ben Stiller's film from '94, which for unknown reasons to this day is called Orbiting without sugar in Polish. No wonder, then, that filmmakers have been trying to sugarcoat it a bit—for a long time and in various ways. Cinema seems to be an ideal medium for this, equipped with a whole range of genres, narrative tricks and means to create different worlds, stories, adventures and identities. And at a time when we are flooded with information about new crises, scandals and problems, this eternal escapist function of film, allowing one to get away and immerse oneself in completely new realities, seems to be extremely attractive and useful. It is additionally intensified by a ubiquitous virtuality, which distorts the division between what is fictional and what has been regarded as true so far. Creative power, self-creation, inventing, conceit and bending reality to our will are just some of the themes we want to look at in the new thematic section of this year's festival. And although it may sound broad and relative, we deliberately do not have the ambition of ultimately defining either what is to be understood by reality, or the process of inventing it. In addition, as the films we have chosen clearly show, these categories quite often tend to get out of control.

When you take a close look at the popular, childlike poem, a fragment of which we used as the name for this new section of the Mastercard OFF CAMERA festival, it reveals a sense of longing and a desire for love. These universal feelings have been at the core of a variety of film genres for more than a century. Here, we wanted to examine one of them more closely: the romantic comedy, which reached its peak of popularity in the 1990s, but has been pushed to the cultural margins in the new millennium, panned by critics and viewers alike—particularly those with a sophisticated taste in film. It became synonymous with trashy cinema—painfully predictable, full of worn-out plot turns, reinforcing stereotypes around boringly romantic femininity and prudent masculinity. But in recent years this genre, which had essentially become a thing of the past, has experienced a renaissance, evidenced not only by the love-themed films produced by Netflix, but also by a sudden interest in romantic comedies from both independent and mainstream filmmakers. As it turns out, romantic comedies not only give the artist a lot of room for creative expression when it comes to creative reimagining and playing with traditional ideas around power dynamics, but above all they’re invariably a popular favourite—and not only for mainstream audiences. We hope that this open secret will be confirmed by the bold and innovative romantic comedies shown at Mastercard OFF CAMERA.