The Gdynia Polish Film Festival (Web Exclusive)
by Darragh O’Donoghue

The Baltic port of Gdynia, host to the Polish Film Festival for nearly forty years, is celebrating both its centenary in 2022, and its recently conferred status of UNESCO “City of Film.” This, together with an impressive volume of work at this year’s festival—fifty-seven films in the main, “microbudget,” and short film competitions, along with several out-of-competition programs, including a recreation of the “lost”
festivals on 1982 and 1983, cancelled when Poland was under martial law—gave the visiting filmgoer reasons to be cheerful after the severely restricted hybrid editions of 2020 and 2021.

I saw thirteen of the twenty films in the main competition. Of these, only one directly dealt with the pandemic—Xawery Żuławski’s zombie satire Apokawixa. It has become a critical truism to spot the wider influence of COVID in every subsequent cultural artifact, and certainly there were plenty of films at Gdynia with COVID-adjacent themes and motifs, such as marital, familial and other social bubbles in uncomfortably close proximity; isolated or marginalized communities; illness and death; injections and masks; struggles with officious and callous public institutions; arbitrary and arbitrarily enforced rules, limiting the freedom of the individual. Of course, attributing these to COVID is misleading—since most films screened were publicly funded, they were conceived, planned, developed, and in many cases began production before the pandemic started. But you could argue that the pandemic merely exposed long simmering pressures and fault lines in the culture.

Apokawixa was by far the most enjoyable film in an otherwise somber slate, where even the big-budget, star-driven spectacles like the opening-night gala Below the Surface were dour in theme and look. Perhaps Żuławski is right and the only response to the end of the world is wild laughter. Apokawixa opens with a zeitgeist-skimming montage introducing the effect of the pandemic on Polish society in general, and the high school students who are the film’s main protagonists. This “overture” is presented as a rush of multimedia images—TV news reports, cell phone footage, social media feeds, YouTube videos, and the like. It is orchestrated by Kamil Wilk (Mikolaj Kubacki), a charismatic scion of the corrupt one percent, whose brain, frazzled by psychotropic drugs, is reflected in the film’s febrile energy. Defying the latest lockdown restrictions, Kamil mounts a huge party in an abandoned castle on which a cross section of Polish society converges, while water pollution, caused by his father’s bogus eco-business, turns the unwitting into zombies. The film’s allegorical intent makes it a twenty-first-century remix of Wajda’s The Wedding (1973). A game young cast and Marian Prokop’s exuberant camerawork keep things engaging until repetitive zombie strain sets in.

The film’s cynicism towards official shibboleths was one response at the festival to the continued influence of Poland’s right-wing government on the national cinema. In one of the short films made by students that preceded each screening, veteran filmmaker Agnieszka Holland bemoaned the censorship that affects filmmakers working within a system that, in most cases, relies on funding from institutions answerable to the government (the festival itself is overseen by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage). She identified two types of censorship on the current filmmaking process: political censorship in terms of the subjects that are accepted or rejected for production; and economic censorship by multiplexes, broadcasters, and other distribution outlets, which appease the government by not screening controversial subjects.

Holland’s comments were greeted with cheers and applause at the opening gala, so clearly reflect a serious and widely shared situation. Nevertheless, there were a handful of brave souls prepared to confront the government’s agenda of bigotry, social exclusion, and historical revisionism. A decade ago, some of these films might have been dismissed as dated exercises in special pleading, but with today’s rolling back of hard-won rights everywhere, they are only to be applauded. Kamil Krawczycki’s artistically modest Elephant, which perhaps escaped official vigilance as a mere “microbudget” film, narrates a love affair between two young men in a rural village, where the government’s anti-LGBT ‘reforms’ are reported on TV and enforced by local thugs’ verbal and physical abuse and homophobic graffiti, and a tacit policy of ostracism. It was a popular winner of the Best Microbudget Film award.  

Woman on the Roof by Anna Jadowska first appears to be a study of a woman prematurely aged and driven mute by a loveless marriage and a selfish son—the color leeched from her life is reflected in the grays, blues, and dull yellows of the mise en scène. But Mira (Dorota Pomykala) is no victim. A hospital midwife by profession, she lives in a world where childbirth and nuclear families are promoted by the state, and abortion is all but illegal. We have had several movies this century about young women struggling to procure an abortion. Woman on the Roof offers a different perspective, that of an older woman who puts herself into huge debt and the risk of social disgrace and legal action when she lends her niece money to get an abortion outside Poland. This is a debt so crippling that Mira, unable to reach out to anyone for support, not least her controlling and conservative husband, is reduced to the feeble bank holdup that opens the film. As a result of the holdup, Mira is “gaslighted”—subjected to intrusive processing by the police, then sectioned. It is at the psychiatric ward that, with timeworn movie sentimentality, Mira gets her only sustained affection, from an old lag, a hardened criminal with a heart of gold. Pomykala is amazing, all reticence and yearning, and was deservedly named Best Actress. That said, the film’s attempt to “subjectively” speak her silence through color, framing, sound, and camera movement doesn’t quite sustain an entire feature.

The government has also been accused of racism and xenophobia in its promotion of a narrow conception of Polish identity. Most of this year’s films either ignored or diminished those who do not fit this conception. The Muslim characters in Silent Land and Bread and Salt, for instance, have no agency, existing only to have violence inflicted upon them, thus provoking the white liberal guilt that is the true subject of these films. It is significant, therefore, that the one film to do some justice to Black experience was made in Britain with British protagonists. Co-funded by the Polish Film Institute and directed by Agnieszka Smoczynska with key Polish creatives, The Silent Twins is a shocking, harrowing, yet also spirited true story depicting institutional racism, misogyny, and discrimination against those with mental-health issues, or “sanism,” in the U.K. June (Letitia Wright) and Jennifer (Tamara Lawrance) are twins in 1970s Wales who have constructed an intense imaginative world in their bedroom but refuse to speak to anyone in the outside world, including their family, schoolmates, and teachers. No reason is given for this silence—although there are clues, including deracination (the family left Barbados for Britain in social and economic decline), and bullying at school, but perhaps, like Bartleby, June and Jennifer simply prefer not to. Certainly, the state thinks it knows the reason—mental illness or “subnormality”—and subject the twins to various forms of social engineering. First, there is the kind of “special” education institutions Kingsley was consigned to in Education, the final episode of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe (a series that also starred Wright). Then there is enforced separation. Finally, for the crime of shoplifting, there is incarceration in Broadmoor, Britain’s notorious asylum for the criminally insane. 

Up to this point, the film had cleaved closely to the sisters’ visionary worldview, using voice-over; quotations from their diaries, stories, and poems; skits and musical numbers; and stop-motion animation similar to what would have been on children’s television at the time. Like other unruly sibling relationships in fiction—think Jean-Pierre Melville’s Cocteau adaptation of Les enfants terribles—June and Jennifer share an intense, claustrophobic, even violent psychic space, but it is unique and inventive, and gives the film its raison d’être. Once the film reaches Broadmoor, the reality principle returns with a vengeance. There are still subjective flashes, but they are contained within an unforgiving institution where the sisters physically and psychically wilt—to the extent that when they are finally allowed to leave, Jennifer cannot cope with the fresh air and dies on the minibus taking them home. The true cause of her death is unexplained. The film’s novelty of subject matter and approach earned it the Golden Lion for the festival’s best film. 

Probably the most internationally notorious of the current government’s policies is its attempt to rewrite the historical record of Poland between 1939–1945. It has become illegal to suggest any local complicity in the Holocaust, which is now entirely blamed on the invading Germans. Instead, Polish heroism is to be celebrated and, considering Poland’s Second World War from whatever angle you choose, that means heroism in defeat. This is a very different conception of defeat from that informing the pessimistic cinema of the 1950s Polish School. Current films and television serials are aimed at the youth market with pretty stars, kinetic narratives, and video-game aesthetics, part of a similar trend that encompasses educational materials, children’s and young adult fiction, and toys and board games. The massively successful Warsaw 44 (2014) anticipated a wave of historical films that have little to do with history and are more concerned with fancy dress, striking a pose, playing at soldiers, and avoiding awkward questions.

Beyond the Surface, directed by acclaimed documentarian Jacek Bławut, reveals the strain of such revisionism on the Polish unconscious. With a big budget and a big shout-out to the funding Ministry of Culture at the opening gala, it seems to fit the ruling party’s agenda perfectly. Stuck in the archetypal social bubble, a submarine crew drawn from the Polish Armed Forces in the West and a group of British liaison officers skulk from the remote Scottish isles to the Netherlands on a mission to destroy two German battleships (I think; the screenplay is not very clear). Despite the hardship and cramped environment, the absence of loved ones and fears for compatriots captured by Soviet and Nazi invaders, life below water is filmed with the warm burnished glow of a luxury liner. There are no class or other tensions between the sailors—collective patriotic and popular songs are sung to cement national cohesion. The greatest threat on board is a half-hearted fight over a “sweetheart” that soon fizzles out in the general homosocial love-in.  

What makes Below the Surface slightly more than an official folly is the ambivalence that cracks it apart. The certainty it promotes around nation, gender, and genre is undermined by strange visual inserts that appear to have been filmed through resin or frosted glass. The effect is like a cross between Aleksandr Sokurov’s stylizations in Mother and Son (1997), and the distortions of a funfair mirror. Officers’ faces look suddenly haunted and pained; sailors’ bodies and the spaces they occupy are distended and contracted. What is the purpose of these inserts? Are they intended as a commentary on, or a representation of the unconscious beneath the official rhetoric? Is it a critique of the aims of its funders? Is it an artistic strategy that backfired? Either way, the film is far from the bombastic flag-waver that it looks like on the surface. It is tedious though. 

Strange and irrecuperable nightmares haunt yet another heroism-in-defeat war film. Krzysztof Lukaszewicz’ Young Eagles dramatizes the hopeless defense of a bridge in Grodno, eastern Poland (now Belarus), during the Soviet invasion in September 1939. At one point its child hero Leoś (Feliks Matecki) stumbles across a landscape devastated by bombardment. He finds lying across a crater a young woman who was clearly raped before being killed. The woman is posed like a Symbolist painting of the sort that dominated nationalist cultures at the turn of the twentieth century—she is Mother Poland, the nation violated by invasion embodied in her homicidal rape. Later, the pubescent has a bad dream in which this corpse is animated and fuses with the pre-teen, inaccessible schoolmate he loves. Not, methinks, what the Law and Justice Party ordered. 

It’s all very unsettling, complicated by the fact that this psycho-erotic-national drama is orchestrated by a Jewish boy. Even before the war, Leoś tries to fit into a world that marginalizes and stigmatizes him. He is told throughout the film that he isn’t a “true” Pole, and is prevented from playing historical heroes in school pageants despite his passion for Polish history. Young Eagles is the most subversive of the films shown at the festival. Not only is its hero a Yiddish-speaking Jew, belonging to a people soon to be wiped out, but it also shows anti-Semitism and nascent fascism to have been rife in the emblematic Polish town of its setting, long before the Germans arrived. This racism is shared by the Home Army soldiers defending the town—a deliberate provocation by Lukaszewicz given the Army’s current status as national heroes after decades of vilification under Communism. Like most of the films at the festival, Young Eagles is no masterpiece, but that hardly matters. It is a fierce reckoning with Polish history and the nation’s current willed amnesia. So long as Gdynia provides a platform for such oppositional works, it will serve a crucial purpose within Polish culture.

Darragh O’Donoghue, a Cineaste Contributing Writer, works as an archivist at Tate Britain in London.

Copyright © 2022 by Cineaste Magazine 

Cineaste, Vol. XLVIII, No. 1