Promotion of culture

• cooperation in long-term programs with clearly defined goals is preferred,
• supported programs should have a broad public audience and be available through the media too,
• major partners in pursuing cultural programs should be first of all cultural institutions, non-governmental institutions and the media.

Bank Millennium has been supporting national and local cultural undertakings for over 30 years now. It as a 360° patron of culture: it promotes art in nearly all its manifestations, including music, painting, sculpture, film, theater, photography, literature and performance. For 17 years, the Bank has been funding the “Golden Scepter” award for eminent cultural personalities, for 11 years “Millennium Pearls” (“Perły Millennium”), a joint program of Bank Millennium and Polish TV (TVP), whose purpose is to produce, promote and present artistic events in the high art realm on Polish TV. For 17 years it has sponsored the Złota Tarka [Golden Grater] Old Jazz Meeting, an International Traditional Jazz Festival. For 8 years it has been associated with the Sacrum Profanum contemporary music festival for the same period with the Bella Skyway Festival – a multimedia spectacle staged by an international group of artists. For 7 years it has been associated with the Two Theaters Festival, for 5 years – with the Gdańsk Music Festival. It also supported the Mozart Festival in the Warsaw Chamber Opera and many others.

In 2019, Bank Millennium supported a unique exhibition of manuscripts of Wisława Szymborska’s poems entitled “The Joy of Writing” in the Jagiellonian Library. The exhibition preceded the preparation of digitization of the Nobel prize winner’s manuscripts by the Jagiellonian Library and their publication in the Jagiellonian Digital Library and the pages of Polona, the largest digital library in Poland.

The most important cultural project in which the Bank is a patron is the Millennium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival. This is the largest, global documentary film festival in Poland with accompanying events (workshops, discussions and concerts). In 2019, the showings and festival events were held in 6 cities in Poland and were attended by an audience of more than 92 thousand (compared to 4.5 thousand in 2004). Bank Millennium has partnered with Millennium Docs Against Gravity for 14 years and in 2016 it assumed the role of titular patron over this festival. In 2019, special attention was paid to the accessibility of culture to people with vision and hearing impairments. Selected movies were available with audio description and a voice-over version made available in the AudioMovie application during the screening in Warsaw and Wrocław.