While Koterski and Krzyształowicz present serious diagnoses, dressing them up in witty film form, their young successors show school with even greater ruthlessness. The young generation of filmmakers rarely looks at school, but when they do portray it, they create images worthy of Bosch’s canvases.
A case in point is Bartosz M. Kowalski, author of one of the strongest but also most cynical debuts of the last decade. In 2016, he made a powerful entrance to Polish cinema with Playground [originally: Plac zabaw], a horrific tale of two boys murdering an innocent child. Talking about school, Kowalski showed it as a place ruled by violence. He spoke of a humiliated girl who faces degradation because of her fatness, a boy who reacts to economic exclusion with his fists and a kid from a good family for whom ruthlessness is a kind of game.
It was not by chance that the young director set the action of his film on the last day of the school year – for he showed characters who come out of the care of an institution but are deprived of any formative influence. ‘School is fiction,’ the young artist seemed to say, and in a dispassionate tone, he weaved a story about boys who, out of boredom, kill a child they accidentally meet. Kowalski showed the ethical emptiness of today's schools, an institution that does not educate or teach proper attitudes but instead serves as a breeding ground for pathology and a training ground for young people to develop their lowest instincts.
Compared to Lord of the Flies, Kowalski’s film is undoubtedly one of the most merciless stories about school. But is it really true? Well, not necessarily, since in Kowalski’s work realism is sacrificed at the altar of a glitzy thesis and shocking form. And it is hard to resist the impression that the director’s diagnosis is not that of a doctor or sociologist but that of a tabloid journalist chasing a sensation.
In this context, the voice of another young filmmaker who looks at school ecosystems in his films rings much truer. This is Kuba Czekaj, creator of the acclaimed Baby Bump, one of the weirdest and truest coming-of-age stories Polish cinema has ever produced. In his debut film, a school is a place that strips away illusions – although it is full of people, it remains a space of loners, each of whom has to deal with the struggle of growing up alone.
Loners