The 2024 Gdynia Film Festival (Web Exclusive)
by Darragh O’Donoghue

 If the films shown at the forty-ninth Polish Film Festival in Gdynia are anything to go by, the recent past continues to haunt the national imaginary. Nine of the films screened in the main competition (out of a total of sixteen) were historical. The periods ranged from the 1930s to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. At least four dealt with the period 1948–89, when Poland was a satellite state of the Soviet Union. That number includes Woman of…, Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert’s campaigning film about trans woman Aniela Wesoly, which begins with a vivid recreation of small-town Poland in the 1980s. It does not include White Courage, which ends just before the Cold War era, but outlines many of the forces that generated it. Or the modern-day Sparrow, whose eponymous comic antihero was traumatized by tragedy in the 1980s, indicated by period home movies. It does include two films that take an intriguingly slanted look at this undemocratic and often violently repressive regime. Kulej and Go Against the Flow explore its distorting impact on two “leisure” industries that tried to create a space outside the world of politics—sports and popular music. 

Sport was heavily controlled in the communist states given its mass appeal, and opportunities for prestige, propaganda, and soft power. Kulej: All That Glitters Isn’t Gold begins where most sports films would end, with its hero, Polish boxer Jerzy Kulej (Tomasz Wlosok), winning a gold medal at the 1964 Olympics. But Kulej’s problems are just beginning. Popular culture has instilled the idea of the sports person as the lone hero par excellence, even in team games; someone who masters all obstacles to achieve a goal. This was not the case in 1960s Poland. Kulej’s individual sporting prowess only takes him so far, and is subject to or manipulated by a variety of external forces, ranging from the emotional and domestic needs of his wife Helena (Michalina Olszanska), and the amateurish betting side hustle of his friends, to the more sinister coercion of the government and its secret police. Kulej’s life and potential are warped to such an extent that Helena ends up spying on him and his friends, and ultimately agreeing to sleep with the secret police chief (Tomasz Kot).

This specific narrative plays out against a depiction of Poland souring under one-time reformer Władysław Gomułka. The promise of 1960s modernity is betrayed by state oppression. An already suppressed free speech is further suppressed, and the public sphere effectively shut down. The authorities respond to the 1968 student protests with mass arrests, torture, and antisemitic purges—one of the Kulejs’s friends is a Jewish student deported for her activism. Local viewers already know that two years after the film’s climax, when Kulej triumphs in the 1968 Mexico Olympics, Gomułka would authorize the state murder of striking workers in Gdynia and nearby Gdańsk, leading to his downfall. 

Such a description makes the film sound grim, and I suppose it is, but Kulej is also a rollicking romp where Xawery Żuławski finally emerges from the shadow of his father Andrzej as a major Polish director in his own right. Żuławski’s earlier films revealed an undisciplined talent whose weakness for freewheeling digressions and sub-Luhrmann spectacle threatened to drown out his stories and characters. Here, he builds on a tight script (written with Rafał Lipski) to focus on his trio of immensely charismatic leads. His stylistic control of narrative, milieu, and period detail approaches the Scorsese of Goodfellas. Żuławski’s bellicose humor is his own, however, whether verbal or physical—I have never heard a Gdynia audience laugh so hard for so long. When Żuławski does stage ambitious set pieces—two dance sequences and an extensive recreation of the student protests—they have real impact. The premiere of Kulej earned an unprecedented eight-minute ovation that could be heard beyond the huge Danuta Baduszkowa Music Theatre, the festival’s main venue.

Music was under comparable state control during the Cold War, even in the southern backwater setting of Wieslaw Paluch’s Go Against the Flow. The title is bitterly ironic. There was little “flow” in the Poland of this period (the late 1970s–’80s), either politically, economically, or psychologically, especially after the imposition of martial law in December 1981. Go Against the Flow is a familiar provincial “coming of age” film, based on the true story of schoolboy punk band KSU and its volatile leader Siczka. British or American punks were noisy in their rejection of the status quo—a status quo from which they benefited in terms of public acclaim, financial reward, media presence, and, eventually, cultural prestige. Polish punks by contrast were subjected to secret police harassment, militia violence, and enforced conscription. The apolitical band’s mere existence was such an existential threat to the state that the security service launched “Operation Razor” to crush it. 

For all that, Go Against the Flow is a profoundly nostalgic film. It generates nostalgia for fans of a beloved local band. The film begins with the real Siczka in performance, now in his sixties, to make the link between “reality” and the fiction we are about to watch. The film’s most original moment focuses on Siczka’s aged face—somewhat battered by forty years’ experience—as he sits before a secret police officer, who batters him, slapping him so hard in the face that he “falls” out of the screen. When he re-emerges, it is as Ignacy Liss playing his teenage self. After this bit of meta-montage, the film becomes predictably linear and chronological, with titles indicating key dates and locations.

The fanboy nostalgia is to be expected. More surprising is the film’s Polish variant of Ostalgie, that much discussed phenomenon of nostalgia for life in Communist East Germany. There have been countless Polish films about the Cold War era since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989, but these tend to be very serious, monuments to a grim and oppressive period. Despite the frequent threats and instances of grimness and oppression, Go Against the Flow is a bit of a lark, more American Pie than Polish School. This materially, culturally, and spiritually impoverished era is evoked for pleasurable recognition—the clothes, the decor, the modes of transport, the official ceremonies, and so on. Even the secret police officer is recuperated by the end, proving more a strict headmaster than a dangerous apparatchik.

Both these approaches—nostalgia for the band and Ostalgie—tend to defang the punk rebelliousness of Siczka and KSU. In fact, the film works hard to reintegrate this allegedly antisocial, anti-Polish phenomenon into Polish history and culture. Several shots show Siczka, sometimes with his lover but more often alone, framed against the nearby mountains. These scenes are meant to intimate the unseen but ever-present Soviet threat—as his nemesis Jerzy Majak (Piotr Glowacki) continually reminds Siczka, the U.S.S.R. is only ten miles away across those peaks (the border is now with Ukraine, a reminder that the threat of war and invasion has not gone away). But such shots also position Siczka, with his dreams of a “foreign,” urban music, within the tradition of a Polish Romanticism rooted in the land, imagining a future far from an oppressive present. 

Of course, such Romanticism has often been as reactionary as revolutionary. The film’s attitude to Siczka is ambivalent. He is clearly set up as a likable hero, but he is also a feckless womanizer indifferent to the emotional needs of the women he uses, then discards. The film refuses to give any of the women their own existence outside Siczka’s needs, so we may assume that it endorses them. This sexism becomes especially apparent when you compare Go Against the Flow with last year’s festival sensation, Imago, a female-directed film about an incarcerated female punk played by her daughter Lena Góra, who also co-wrote the script (a quick aside to note that only four of the films in this year’s main competition were directed or co-directed by women). Go Against the Flow also looks thin compared to this year’s Kneecap, the widely acclaimed meta-biopic of the Irish-language rappers, which explores the intersections of performance, gender, identity, culture, and history, with far more wit, intelligence, and cinematic élan. 

Music and sports—and the movies about them—have traditionally celebrated male heroes, while the classic “rebel”/dissenter figure has, until recently, been male. What of women who wanted to confront the status quo in Communist Poland? The title character of Simona Kossak starts from a far more privileged position than the protagonists of Kulej and Go Against the Flow. Simona (Sandra Drzymalska) belongs to a family of famous patriotic painters, while her mother’s resistance activities during World War II earned her such official esteem that even careerist government ministers treat her with awe.  

Simona is given a cushy job in what appears to be a latter-day Garden of Eden—researching the diets of deer in the Białowieża National Park on Poland’s eastern borders with Belarus (a similar “green border” to Agnieszka Holland’s film of that name, which was awarded the festival’s Golden Lion, having been banned by the far-right government last year). Though brilliant, Simona is naive, as her witheringly magisterial mother Elzbieta repeatedly points out (another unforgettable performance by Agata Kulesza in Ida mode). Varying the traditional (and usually male) “rites of passage” narrative, Simona’s acquisition of knowledge throughout the film does not acclimatize her to social reality. It reveals the falsity of her position. Her family name and her research are being manipulated by the authorities to justify industrial depletion of Białowieża and the culling of the deer. Mansplaining male mentors are exposed, while her seemingly toxic mother turns out to have been teaching her valuable life lessons all along.

Like Eve, Simona is cast out of paradise after eating from the fruit of knowledge. She is forced to face state obstruction like Kulej and Siczka, with official threats to her agency and creativity. While it does not minimize the dangers—or other “hidden” evils of the era, such as child abuse—Adrian Panek’s film obscures them in a cute, “quirky” tone and a final retreat into cloying fantasy. By the end, Elzbieta’s tart truth-telling is sorely missed.

For me, the standout film of the festival was White Courage, a family melodrama that renews old themes of paternity, patrimony, and patria by chilling the heat of the melodrama. White Courage combines two subjects—folk ethnicity and World War II—that in the past have been co-opted by Polish nationalists. The title might also give one pause. But here “white” can serve as a wiping of the slate clean, as writer-director Marcin Koszałka removes all the clichés and myths that have accrued to these subjects to produce something new. 

He does this in two ways. First by reworking subject matter. Ethnicity in White Courage does not indicate some ancestral Polish “essence” (as was the case with last year’s cartoon The Peasants, for instance). The Polish Highlanders (also known as Gorals or Vlachs) were historically related to the Balkans and Central Europe and fought with the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany in World War I. Before the film opens in the late 1930s, the Highlanders became Polish by an historical or geopolitical accident beyond their control, as the once-vanished Polish nation was reconstituted in 1919 having been divided for over a century among three foreign empires.

Collective tradition in this community is not an unambiguous good. It can mask the oppression of individuals and is cynically invoked by elders to further their materialist ends. When Jędrzek Zawrat (Filip Plawiak) is forced to cede his fiancée Bronka (Sandra Drzymalska, winner of the Best Actress Award) to his elder brother Maciek (Julian Świeżewski, Best Supporting Actor) in marriage, he abandons his traditional way of life for Kraków. Despite the sexual and cultural liberation of the big city, presided over by his new lover, the Jewish artist Helena (Wiktoria Gorodecka), Maciek cannot resist the pull of the land, the Tatra mountains in southern Poland. He befriends German mountaineer Wolfram von Kamitz (Jakub Gierszal), leading to an unsavory if ambivalent association with the occupying Nazis after Poland is invaded in 1939. The film’s rare and revisionist portrait of Polish collaboration with the Nazis is bracing, compelling, and nuanced.

The film’s “year zero” approach to subject matter is reinforced by Koszałka’s disinfected approach to filmmaking. He strips away the overpowering audiovisual rhetoric we have come to expect of the local World War II film—whether those earnest ordeals produced by the Polish School in the 1950s and early 1960s, or the video game aesthetic of recent years. The digital image is sharp, crisp, icy—at once hyperreal and somehow fantastic. Decor is decluttered. Music is an unsettling and visceral drone, now barely audible, now overwhelmingly intense. There are no swooping aerial shots or hyperbolic edits. Camera movement is restricted and focused. Compositions are tight with characters not quite filling the screen, despite being shot from below to give them a stature they do not always possess. Hearteningly, the festival awarded Koszałka both Best Director and Best Screenplay (with Łukasz M. Maciejewski). For a film stinking with genocide, torture, betrayal, and bad faith, this modern Bergfilm is an exhilarating breath of fresh air.

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

For further information on the Gdynia Film Festival, visit here.

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