Each year in mid-September, while Venice and Toronto play host to sprawling international film festivals that serve as a launchpad for awards campaigns and distribution deals, the Polish film industry convenes in the quietly bustling Baltic seaport town of Gdynia for a showcase of the best in contemporary Polish cinema, with a sprinkling of classic and overlooked titles for good measure. The relatively circumscribed nature of the Polish Film Festival—known as the Festiwal Polskich Filmów Fabularnych, or FPFF, in Polish—lends a sense of purpose to the proceedings often lacking from bigger, more wide-ranging festivals.
Some of Poland’s more pressing geopolitical concerns were evident in the streets of Gdynia, even along the city’s touristy Southern Pier, along which runs Avenue Jana Pawła II, named, like so many sites in Poland, for the Polish-bred, anti-communist pope whose Western alliances and direct support to Poland’s Solidarity movement contributed to the eventual breakup of the Soviet Union. Here, light poles sporting Polish flags alternate with those flying the blue-and-yellow banner of Ukraine, one of the many visible signs reflecting the country’s support for its neighbor’s fight against Russia. Another, spotted at a streetside souvenir kiosk during a sojourn I made to the nearby city of Gdansk, echoed local sentiments even more plainly (and crudely): a roll of toilet paper with Vladimir Putin’s face emblazoned on each sheet.
If Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was still too fresh to have wormed its way into the films presented at this year’s FPFF, Polish-Ukrainian relations nevertheless popped up in a few different entries, often with an apprehensiveness that betrays some of the more strident public declarations of solidarity with the Ukrainian cause. This sense of unease between the two nations featured most prominently in Anna Maliszewska’s Dad, in which Polish trucker Michal (Eryk Lubos, terrifically well-balanced in a role that could’ve easily lent itself to mawkishness) transports his daughter, Miska (Klaudia Kurak), several tons of frozen fish, and two illegal-immigrant Ukrainians—one Miska’s recently deceased nanny, the other Miska’s best friend, Lenka (Polina Gromova)—across the border into the hinterlands of Ukraine.
Michal returns the dead woman to her hickish husband, Wasyl (Sergei Solovyov), who foists shot after shot of vodka on the recovering-alcoholic trucker with an off-putting insistence. Defensive about Ukraine’s perceived backwardness in comparison to the more cosmopolitan Poland, Wasyl moans that Poles look down on Ukrainians like himself even while “we” are keeping Europe safe by fighting Putin. The joke here, which received a surprised but knowing laugh from the crowd at my screening, is that Wasyl isn’t anywhere near any sort of frontline and certainly isn’t doing any fighting. Geopolitical tensions can become simply a card to be played when one wants to coerce another into doing one’s bidding. Unfortunately, while empathetic about the plight of immigrants in Poland, Dad is ultimately too tidy and sentimental to explore the average Pole’s ambivalent relationship with foreigners in any real depth.
By contrast, Damian Kocur’s Bread and Salt—another debut feature and one of the strongest films in the main competition—tackles similar themes of Polish xenophobia with an entrancing mix of candor and obliqueness. Kocur casts real-life classical pianist Tymoteusz Bies as a version of himself, who visits his provincial hometown while on break from his studies at the Warsaw Academy of Music and finds himself simultaneously alienated from his brother’s (Tymoteusz’s actual sibling, Jacek) crew of small-minded dirtbags and desperate for their approval.
Throughout, Kocur’s unflinching yet sensitive direction fuses the patiently observant, documentary-like eye of Abbas Kiarostami with Michael Haneke’s penchant for inexorably rising dread. Bread and Salt touches on a number of hot-button issues—racism against Turkish immigrants, homophobia, and the rudderless state of Polish culture—but it never feels overstuffed or didactic. Rather, the film offers a singularly compelling interrogation of the moral responsibilities of an individual living in a society infected with hate.
One of the more enlivening aspects of Bread and Salt is the way that it looks back to the heights of Polish culture’s past while still fully engaging itself in the nation’s present. Or, to put it another way, Kocur’s film bridges the age of Chopin with the current era of decadent hip-hop. Rap, beloved by the Polish youth, popped up frequently throughout the festival. Xawery Zulawski’s apocalypse comedy Apokawixa, an odd, hyper-topical hybrid of Van Wilder and Shaun of the Dead, basically pauses itself two-thirds of the way through for a hip-hop dance party. Meanwhile, Grzegorz Mołda’s Splinter, an endearing but cliché-ridden rise-and-fall narrative about a female rapper (Magdalena Wieczorek) from the projects, attempts to highlight some of the sexism and vapidity of contemporary hip-hop. However, only Kocur’s film fully grapples with the contradictions of rap in Poland, that it’s at once an outlet for the marginalized lower classes and a means of reinforcing their own prejudices and mindless aggression.
Kocur’s ambivalent, pessimistic vision of Polish society apparently didn’t endear his film to the FPFF jury, which ignored it completely when handing out their awards (though the film did pick up the top prize from the separate, youth-focused Young Jury). The festival’s Golden Lion instead went to Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Silent Twins, an impressionistic true-life portrait of selectively mute sisters from Wales who retreat into their own realm of fantasy. The film, Smoczyńska’s first in English, reflects a genuine attempt to inhabit the imagination-rich headspace of June and Jennifer Gibbons (Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance) while resisting the impulse to squish their complicated lives into a neat narrative frame.
At its best, the film draws on the rich history of Polish cinema—including the homespun puppet animation of Władysław Starewicz and the delirious emotional maximalism of Andrzej Żuławski—to bring June and Jennifer’s shared interior world to life. At its worst, however, the film feels shapeless and uneven, disconnected from the racial and socio-political realities that contributed to the Gibbons sisters’ long, tragic confinement in a mental institution.
If Smoczyńska found her story far outside of Poland, her film, with its restlessness of vision, nevertheless felt in direct dialogue with the older Polish titles at the festival, including Wojciech Has’s rueful yet vigorous Anton Chekhov adaptation An Uneventful Story and Filip Bajon’s operatic turn-of-the-century wrestling biopic Aria for an Athlete. With their sprightly, moving cameras and florid mise-en-scène, these films practically surround their subjects and attack them with overwhelming force. Even when they indulge in languid meditations on the meaning(lessness) of life, Has’s and Bajon’s work dispenses with clean narrative lines and easily digestible moral lessons in favor of a constantly grasping for moments of ecstasy.
That same sense of constant probing for transcendence was evident in two otherwise very different competition titles directed by old masters of Polish cinema, Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO and Lech Majewski’s Brigitte Bardot Forever. If Skolimowski’s poetically peripatetic immersion into the life of a simple donkey, with its playful use of strobe effects, hyper-saturated color, and drone shots, feels like the work of an artist a quarter of the director’s age, Majewski’s languorous investigation of the self is evidently the film of an aged man.
Based on Majewski’s own novel, Pilgrimage to the Grave of Brigitte Bardot Miraculous, Brigitte Bardot Forever at first appears to be a lightly comic nostalgia trip in the Amarcord vein, exemplified by an early scene in which a young schoolboy (Kacper Olszewski) gets in trouble from his uptight communist-functionary schoolmaster for accidentally launching a pear at the classroom portrait of Polish leader Władysław Gomułka—a moment which elicited some chuckles from the older Poles in the audience. But the film gradually shifts into something closer to Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, a meditative, philosophical expedition into the director’s own subconscious, which takes the form of a cavernous hotel populated by the pop-culture icons of his youth—the Beatles, Simon Templar from The Saint, and, of course, Brigitte Bardot (Joanna Opozda)—as well as great artists and writers like Paul Cézanne and Rabindranath Tagore.
Majewski was a student of Has at the National Film School in Łódź, and Brigitte Bardot Forever suggests a highly personal reworking of Has’s labyrinthine phantasmagoria The Hourglass Sanatorium; it also shares with that film a thematic denseness that frequently verges on impenetrability. There can be something rejuvenating about taking in a film one doesn’t fully understand. I was tossing Brigitte Bardot Forever around in my head the morning after seeing it as I ambled down the Southern Pier, hoping for a nice view of the Baltic Sea. As I worked my way toward the end of the esplanade, I noticed a large stone sculpture with the bust of a man protruding from the top. Assuming it was some politician or military figure, I didn’t pay it too much heed until I came close upon it and realized it was in fact a gargantuan monument to the great seafaring author Joseph Conrad, a favorite of my youth.
With Majewski’s film fresh in my mind, it felt a bit as if I’d walked down a pier in a foreign land only to watch something seemingly bubble out of my subconscious. In a way, that was a nice metaphor for a film festival. For non-Polish cinephiles such as myself, the festival provides a matchless opportunity to take the pulse of the current state of Poland’s film culture and, through the veritable camera obscura that is the nation’s cinema, to glimpse something of Polish culture itself. At the same time, one travels halfway across the globe to experience a couple dozen works by a variety of artists from divergent backgrounds, and as much as one appreciates the sociological detail embedded in this film or the fine craftsmanship of that one, the most lasting experiences are always those that hit at one’s core, and I’m fortunate to say that more than a few films at FPFF, including EO, Bread and Salt, and Brigitte Bardot Forever, did just that.
The Polish Film Festival ran from September 12—17.
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