For political or economic reasons, it may be useful to categorize a group of films as Polish, but ontologically the concept of a national cinema is problematic. For what constitutes a film's identity? Is a film Polish if the director or producer is of Polish nationality, if it is produced in Poland with Polish money or personnel, if it deals with a Polish subject, or displays a certain degree of Polishness? Or may a film be described as Polish only if the audience perceives it as such?

In 2008 I produced Silver City, a documentary film that looks at Polish immigration from the perspective of two of the approximately 1 million Polish citizens who moved to the United Kingdom after their country joined the European Union in 2004. Although Silver City was not shot on Polish soil—it was filmed in Aberdeen, Scotland—it does represent a particularly Polish experience. The director was not Polish—I am a filmmaker from the Netherlands—but the film was made with the participation of a mainly Polish cast and crew.

Silver City's “mixed heritage” raises questions with respect to the relationship between cinema and nation, which in the past has been approached in myriad ways. In the 1960s, in convergence with auteur theory, the concept of national identity was mainly used as a descriptive category and a means to organize the curriculum of film studies departments; Ingmar Bergman thereby connoted Sweden; Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, France; John Ford, the United States; and so on.