Still-frame from Yael Bartana's "Mary Koszmary"
Ryszard Bugajski's Interrogation and the Deprived film series, curated by Monika Szewczyk and presenting works by Yael Bartana and Artur Żmijewski, gives Irish audiences a glimpse at difficult topics in Polish cinema past and present
Poland, 1951. Tonia (Krystyna Janda) is a cabaret singer. One night she gets very drunk and wakes up in a prison cell. She is asked to give evidence against a former lover. She refuses, and the authorities try to break her through a long process of brutality and intimidation.
Interrogation (Przesłuchanie) is a 1982 Polish crime film directed by. Due to its anti-communist themes, the Polish communist government banned the film from public viewing for over seven years, until the 1989 dissolution of the Eastern Bloc allowed it to see the light of day. The film had its first theatrical release in December 1989 in its native Poland, and was entered into the 1990 Cannes Film Festival where Krystyna Janda won the award for Best Actress and the film itself was nominated for the Palme d'Or.
The Interrogation is brought to Belfast thanks to the support of the Polish Cultural Institute in London and the film's remastered copy is provided by Second Run DVD. The screening takes place on the10th of May, 2012 at Belfast's Red Barn Gallery, at 7 pm.
Also showing as part of 6th edition of Polish Cultural Week is the Deprived series of films by Yael Bartana and Artur Zmijewski. The series is curated by Monika Szewczyk, and the Polish Cultural Week in on from the 30th of April until the 19th of May, 2012.
The Deprived video project explores the often difficult Polish-Jewish relations which are determined by common historical experiences, a state of co-existence between tolerance and the inability of a shared citizenship. Both films by the Israeli video artist Yael Bartana and the Polish filmmaker and photographer Artur Zmijewski show common stereotypes of anti-Polish attitudes among Jews and anti-Semitic resentments among Poles.
They emphasise an emptiness and a lack of something, both sides were deprived of: deprived of homes and homeland and also deprived of basic experiences of living and being together.
Both artist are widely acclaimed internationally and have represented Poland at the Venice Biennale, Artur Zmijewski in 2005 and Yael Bartana in 2011, the first time a non-Polish national has represented Poland.
Our Songbook is a film about problems with individual memory and the gradual degeneration of collective memory. During his stay in Tel Aviv, Zmijewski contacted a number of Polish Jews who had left Poland – the land of their ancestors. He asked them to recall and sing the songs of their youth. The protagonists recall all kinds of melodies: cavalry songs, pre-war pop hits, the Polish national anthem.
Żmijewski shows a world that is irrevocably becoming past. Our Songbook is one of the most moving and meaningful projects of the Polish art of recent years, and one that has found a reflection in the debates on national identity and Polish-Jewish history.
See the film at the Museum of Modern Art.
See more on Artur Zmijewski
Nightmares (Mary koszmary) is the first film in the trilogy …and Europe will be stunned and explores a complicated set of social and political relationships among Jews, Poles and other Europeans in the age of globalisation.
A young Polish activist, founder and chief editor of Krytyka Polityczna magazine and leader of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP), played here by Sławomir Sierakowski, delivers a speech in the abandoned National Stadium in Warsaw. He urges three million Jews to come back to Poland.
Using the structure and sensibility of a World War II propaganda film, ‘Nightmares’ addresses contemporary anti-Semitism and xenophobia in Poland, the longing for the Jewish past among liberal Polish intellectuals and the Zionist dream of return to Israel.
The other films in Yael Bartana's trilogy …and Europe will be stunned are Mur i wieża (Wall and Tower), 2009 and Zamach (Assassination), 2011.
To see the film on the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw web archive
Yael Bartana and Artur Żmijewski both mark their significant presence at this year’s 7th Biennale of Contemporary Art in Berlin, of which Artur Żmijewski is the curator. The two artists participate in one of the most controversial and politically-charged editions of the event, which has stirred much heated discussion in the press and among the Biennale’s audiences.
For more information about VI Polish Cultural Week see: www.polishculturalweek.com