The 2023 Polish Film Festival in Gdynia (Web Exclusive)
by Darragh O’Donoghue

Although it could not have been planned that way, the forty-eighth Polish Film Festival will stand as one of the last cultural monuments of the outgoing far-right government that has ruled over the country since 2015. Along with socially intolerant and ultra-Catholic anti-immigration and anti-abortion policies, the Law and Justice party and its allies have promoted a version of Polish history that highlighted individual nationalist heroism, and downplayed, revised, distorted, or denied more awkward examples of collective complicity, such as the many historical instances of antisemitism in Poland. This promotion took many forms, from legislating against historical facts pointing to Polish participation in the Holocaust to removing dissident directors and curators from museums and other cultural centers. Most significantly in the context of the festival, the government promoted its worldview by controlling the finance of films and television.

This extended to controlling exhibition. The festival, held since 1987 in the Baltic port city of Gdynia, was founded to showcase the year’s output in Polish cinema, including the work of high-profile auteurs whose films have premiered elsewhere. Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War (2018) and Jerzy Skolimowski’s Eo (2022), for example, first screened in Cannes before coming to Gdynia. Agnieszka Holland’s Venice prize-winner Green Border was conspicuously absent from this year’s Gdynia program, despite the director having won the Grand Prize three times in the past. Its subject is Middle Eastern and African migrants on the border between Belarus and Poland and it directly attacks the government’s xenophobic immigration policies. The film has been subjected to vicious vitriol from government ministers, public officials, and fellow travelers in the media.

The kind of film the government wanted to show, promoting it first by funding then through prestige screenings and via social media, is The Pilecki Report. Captain Witold Pilecki (1901–48) was a genuinely heroic figure, serving with various nationalist groups during the various occupations of Poland in the first half of the twentieth century, and smuggling himself into Auschwitz to set up a resistance network and to report on conditions in the death camp, before being tortured, then murdered by the communists in a postwar show trial. 

In his lifetime, it seems that Pilecki tried to move Polish nationalism away from Christian ideology and antisemitism but, since his posthumous rehabilitation in the 1990s, his biography has been weaponised by the forces of reaction. For instance, one of the first acts of the current government was to create a Pilecki Institute, a so-called historical research facility designed to whitewash Polish collaboration with the German occupiers during World War II by seeking out atypical resistants. Coming away from The Pilecki Report, you would be forgiven for thinking that Auschwitz only held “Polish” patriots—“Polish” always meaning Gentile in these films; Jews can never truly be Polish. The Jewish experience of the Holocaust is dismissed in a couple of lines. Presented in the masochistic “Heroic Polish History” manner, the film follows earlier biopics by constructing Pilecki (Przemyslaw Wyszynski) as a Christ-like martyr—in itself a loaded and offensive gesture. The Pilecki Report is particularly dismaying given director Krzysztof Lukaszewicz’s honorable grappling with the Polish taboo in his last film, Orleta, Grodno ’39, shown at last year’s festival.

There is nothing pious about Scarborn, which won the Golden Lion for the festival’s best film and several critics’ awards. When the film’s first shot—a long, Miklós Jancsó-like sequence shot showing a landlord’s stooges beating up a peasant in a vast Polish field—is interrupted by a rifle-wielding African American who shouts, “Get the fuck out of here!” in English, you know that you are watching something different. It is as if a Black man has not only intruded on the traditionally white battlefield of Polish history, but on the festival itself—no other film in competition featured a protagonist of color.

Such racially inflected iconoclasm suggests the work of Tarantino, and Paweł Maślona’s film owes much to late works such as Inglourious Basterds (2009), Django Unchained (2012), and The Hateful Eight (2015). These are tonally dark period films that use the clichés of genre and exploitation films to explore the representation of divisive moments in American history. The context of Scarborn is arguably the most traumatic in Polish history until World War II—the period when Poland was wiped off the map for over 120 years, its lands divided between three neighboring empires. 

It is 1794, in the aftermath of earth-shattering revolutions in the United States and France. Eastern Poland is under the control of Russia (needless to say, this is a film as much about 2023 as it is the late eighteenth century). Tadeusz “Kos” Kósciuszko (a wonderfully shaggy and laconic Jacek Braciak heading an all-star cast), Polish hero of the American Revolution, has returned home to command a nationalist uprising; man with the rifle Citizen Domingo (Jason Mitchell) is his companion-in-arms. Up against a rotten, centuries-old social system, Kos needs to ally himself with landlords who, mentally decrepit after centuries of inbreeding, are unwilling to commit too many resources to a system that has served them rather well, especially the system of indentured peasant labor known as serfdom—a somewhat tendentious link is drawn when former Black slave Domingo and Polish “bastard” Ignac (Bartosz Bielenia) exchange scars from overseers’ whips and sticks. Meanwhile, a Russian infantry squadron led by jovial sadist Captain Dunin (Robert Wieckiewicz) hunts down Kos, raping and pillaging across the countryside. Wieckiewicz shared the Best Supporting Actor award for what is essentially the Christoph Waltz role.

Like Django Unchained, the film’s second half is largely confined to one interior location—an impromptu dinner party wherein the main antagonists gather, some feigning identities, but all knowing or confident that they know who the others are. The tension of waiting for the inevitable explosion of violence is displaced onto a kind of ghoulish burlesque. The viewer who knows more than any single character what is going on—not least the grim fact that all this gun- and wordplay is for nothing, and that Poland will disappear for over a century—watches with rapt pleasure and terror. 

Screenwriter Michal A. Zielinski is not yet as sophisticated a writer as Tarantino and there are times when suspense could easily be mistaken for stasis. Maślona, however has an eye that Tarantino never had. His sense of camera movement and composition is unerring. With his amazing director of photography Piotr Sobocinski Jr, Maślona creates images in vivid chiaroscuro—soldiers feasting by fire, interiors barely lit by candle, sparks literally flying in gun battle—that are as resonant as anything in Baroque art or Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. The distributors need to do something about the title, however. The original Kos means “Blackbird,” and refers to Kósciuszko’s nickname, derived from his surname. The English title Scarborn is not even a proper word; if “Blackbird” is not acceptable, surely “Scarred” or “Scars” would be better than Scarborn?

When it was wiped off the political map in 1795, Poland kept alive national feeling through culture, namely Romantic literature and painting, folk customs, decoration, textiles, music and dance, and vernacular architecture. This national feeling is resuscitated in the animated feature Peasants. The film tells another dismal story of the Polish countryside—lively young Jagna is married off against her will to a rich old widower. She has an affair with her foster son and, when it is discovered, her transgressive existence threatens the material prosperity of her in-laws and the wider community, and she is ostracized in a sequence of sexualized mob violence that owes more to Game of Thrones than national poet Adam Mickiewicz. 

Why do so many Polish artworks celebrating the land tell horrific stories taking place on that land? Ah, but we have been taking the story too literally! At the film’s climax, Jagna is at her most abject—naked, caked and shivering in mud, abandoned by her community. Instead of the destitution or death that you might expect to follow, however, a moment of transformation occurs. Jagna rises, merging with the land (the word “Pola,” it should be noted, means “field” and may be part of the etymology of “Poland”) and weather to become a transcendental entity, Mother Poland herself. She starts off the narrative as a human—a breathing, desiring woman—and ends as an allegorical figure; this has been a common and reactionary nationalist maneuver across cultures. The world of humans is historically and politically determined, but it is transient. The land, with its recurring cycles (the narrative is divided into chapters named for the seasons, ending with the rebirth of Spring) remains eternal, as does the Polish nation, or at least the limited notion of the Polish nation conceived here.

Nevertheless, Peasants won the Audience Award and is the film most likely to play abroad—it played at the London Film Festival soon after my return from Gdynia. It was produced by the makers of Loving Vincent, a much-loved animation that told the story of Van Gogh through recreations of his artworks. In Peasants, every scene, composition, and gesture are derived from painting, mainly from nineteenth-century Polish painting in its Romantic, Naturalist, Impressionist, and Post-Impressionist phases, although there are nods to works like Vermeer’s “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” and Millet’s “The Gleaners” to keep international audiences interested. The film’s technique is glorified Rotoscoping—live action is painted over to create images that are supposed to be flickering and fluid but that, when concentrating on human action (and the film’s plot is high melodrama), is as stiff and artificial as early digital renderings of video games like Final Fantasy (2001). The Fleischer brothers did this kind of thing with more economy, wit, and contemporaneity a century ago. 

There were several brave efforts in the festival to escape both nationalist and audiovisual clichés, finding their inspiration in the theater, pop culture, the avant-garde, or advertising. Dorota Kędzierzawska’s Dreams Full of Smoke was a black-and-white Strindbergian ghost sonata filmed in the hushed, distorted manner of Sokurov’s Mother and Son (1997); Piotr Dumała’s Fin del Mundo? fused Chekhov, farce, and science fiction. The emphasis in both was on the use of language and its delivery by the actors. The local audience enjoyed Fin del Mundo? but this ignorant viewer was left somewhat bemused. The sensational Imago was a collaboration between director Olga Chajdas and actress Lena Góra, in which the latter embodies the life story of her mother Ela, a post-punk singer and artist. For once, politics and history were pushed to the margins, as the film refreshingly concentrated on female experience, mental health, and the cultural underground that flourished in parallel with the often socially conservative Solidarity movement of the early 1930s. Imago won the festival’s second place Silver Lion, and Góra deservedly won the Best Actress Award for her fearless performance.

A very different film about resolute women and health was directed by a male filmmaker. Sławomir Fabicki’s Anxiety took two of the hoariest “male” film genres—the buddy movie and the road movie—to tell the story of two sisters traveling from Warsaw to Lake Lugano in Switzerland. Much of the impact of the film derives from the measured revelation of information. For the first reel, we don’t know if we are watching two colleagues, lovers, or family members (it turns out to be a mixture of all three). Suffice it to say that this is one of several films in the festival about wracked bodies and spiritual struggle. Malgorzata (Magdalena Cielecka) begins the film as an apparently masterful lawyer, continually domineering her younger sister Lucja (Marta Nieradkiewicz). It turns out that Malgorzata is about to die, having undergone two mastectomies that failed to stop the cancer that is killing her. 

The script is structured as a conflict between Malgorzata’s desire to control her uncontrollable destiny, and her sister’s attempts to keep her alive. The film’s meticulous framing and cool mise en scène, and its focus on bodily abjection amid the haute-bourgeois family, may remind the viewer of Michael Haneke’s provocations. There is even a version of the infamous razor scene from The Piano Teacher (2001), as well as sequences of protracted vomiting in immaculate hotel rooms, and a humiliating motorway pick-up, wherein Malgorzata is rejected by a married man when he realizes that she has no breasts for him to hold on to. This last scene is watched by Lucja, who later masturbates her older sister to a final orgasm in the passenger seat. Far from generating the contemptuous, clinical distance that is the usual effect of Haneke’s cinema, the productive incongruity between “cool” style and “hot” subject matter only makes the film more intimate and emotionally gripping. A weepie for even the most hardened cynic, and hopefully an encouragement to Polish filmmakers that the Present, like the Past, can be a foreign country worth visiting.

For more information on the festival, click here.

Darragh O’Donoghue is an archivist at Tate Britain in London.

Copyright © 2023 by Cineaste Magazine

Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 1