The Skalny Center for Polish and Central European Studies at the University of Rochester brings the cream of the recent crop of Polish cinema to the Little Theatre in their 5th annual Polish Film Festival, which begins this Friday. The festival includes ten feature films (plus one short) and runs through Thursday, November 16.

The highlight of this year's festival is The Debt, a haunting true story that illustrates why you shouldn’t mix friends and business. Set in early 1999, The Debt is about Adam and Stefan, two young entrepreneurs who unsuccessfully try to obtain a bank loan that would fund a plan to sell scooters in Austria. Because they have no collateral, the banks laugh the duo’s $300,000 loan request right out the door.

Down in the dumps, Adam and Stefan have a chance encounter with an old schoolmate named Gerard, who tells his old friends he can help arrange financing for their scooter business. And Gerard comes through, but the bad news is that he produces Adam and Stefan with a $6,000 bill for his “expenses” in securing the funding. He also tacks on $1,000 of additional interest with each day that passes. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Gerard starts acting more psychotic than Dennis Hopper in … well, in anything.

The Debt is a promising directorial debut from Krzysztof Krauze, who used a handheld camera to give the movie a realistic documentary feel. It’s a drab, colorless film full of interesting camera angles, but, more importantly, The Debt is a fantastic cinematic nightmare. And if anyone from CBS is reading this, what do we need to do to get this Gerard character on the new season of Survivor?

Most Americans hadn’t heard of Andrzej Wajda before he won an honorary Oscar earlier this year, despite the fact that he’s been making films for 50 years and won four major prizes at Cannes throughout his career. Here’s your chance to see what the fuss is all about. Pan Tadeusz is based on an epic poem written by Adam Mickiewicz in 1834 while he lived in exile in Paris. The film is told in flashbacks while a character playing Mickiewicz reads his story to a bunch of fellow exiles.

The flashbacks begin in 1811 and focus on a Hatfield/McCoy-type rivalry between two Lithuanian families (here they’re the Horeszkos and the Soplicas). The two clans started their long-running hatred for one another when Count Horeszko forbade his daughter to marry young Jacek Soplica, who then used a well-timed Russian attack on the Horeszko compound to murder the diabolical Count. The film follows the lineage of each family tree for several bloody years, leading to Napoleon’s invasion of Lithuania.

Tadeusz, which is beautifully filmed if you can pry your eyes away from the tough-to-read subtitles, is long and kind of a bore if you're not familiar with the importance of Mickiewicz’s poem to the Poles. Our country has nothing that compares to its passion and patriotism and, as a result, the film may lack some punch when playing to audiences outside Poland.

Although it sounds like a blast, Life as a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease is really quite depressing. This award winner from the Moscow International Film Festival centers on an elderly atheist doctor named Tomasz, who is working on the set of a film about St. Bernard. Tomasz’s suspicions of his own failing health are confirmed when he is diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer.

Viewers beware --- you might think you’ve walked into the wrong film. Disease’s first 10 minutes are basically taken from the fictitious St. Bernard movie. Once the film settles into its main story, we see Tomasz struggle with the meaning of life and death for the first time in his 60-year-old life. Nicely directed and strikingly photographed, Disease will make you feel more morose than Al Gore when his “battery low” light clicks on.

On the lighter side of Polish cinema is Olaf Linde Lubaszenko, the star of Operation Goat. Lubaszenko plays scientist Adam Horn, who, in order to keep funding for his lab, makes a video of an experiment where he switches the personalities of a dog and a goat. The catch is that Adam’s experiment is a hoax (he overdubs the video to make it appear that the dog and goat have swapped personas).

Meanwhile, a ballet dancer named Vera is blackmailed by the KGB into sneaking into Adam’s lab and stealing the formula for his remarkable new procedure. Long story short, Adam and Vera do the horizontal mambo and unknowingly trade bodies, which leads to a funny scene where Adam wakes up and tries to pee standing up (in Vera’s body). The rest of Goat is full of the wacky hijinks you would expect from a Polish version of Freaky Friday.

Lubaszenko performs a different kind of personality swap in Boys Don’t Cry, where he turns in a decent directorial performance. The film is about Jim and Oscar, two nerdy students at a Polish music school. Like most music students, they’re unlucky with the ladies and decide to get a couple of hookers (one tells his pro about his desire to work in advertising when she asks what he wants). After some confusion about the fee, a pimp makes off with a valuable artifact belonging to Jim’s father.

In the meantime, two small-time gangsters have been given a suitcase full of cash to deliver to a mob boss’ idiotic son (he looks like the “bad ass” member of the Backstreet Boys), whose sidekick just happens to be the pimp that ripped off Jim and Oscar. Jim unsuspectingly walks into the middle of a gun battle over the suitcase and finds himself hunted by the mob. Cry is well-written and contains a bunch of very funny scenes.