The protagonists of the film are united by the idea of playing Chopin in unusual, unique places. Places of the eponymous darkness. We follow Leszek Możdżer’s preparations for a concert in Auschwitz, Jae-Yeon Won for a concert on the Seung-il-gyo bridge connecting South and North Korea, Fares Mark Basmadjie in a Beirut camp for Syrian refugees, whose audience has never heard Chopin... Finally, we watch the concerts themselves, which merge into one performance, where individual interpretation, technical virtuosity, workshop do not matter, but the universal, healing power of sound does. In the finale we hear an arrangement of the Scherzo in C sharp minor, Op. 39. The creator of the music for the film (including all compositions) is Leszek Możdżer.
The theme of being an émigré and the question of identity is important in the film. Chopin, who is the fourth character in the story, had a French father and was, after all, an emigrant. ‘I am not half Syrian, half Polish’ – says Basmadji. ‘I am fully Syrian and fully Polish.’ The protagonist left professional piano playing for programming, and returned to performing especially for the film – in Beirut he performed in traditional Syrian costume sewn by his mother, a Polish woman.
The subtitle ‘I Am Not Afraid of Darkness’ are the words of Leszek Możdżer. Before the performance he walks in Auschwitz along the road taken by the death wagons. He does not lose hope that music can be an antidote to trauma, it can be a light. Among the audience of the concert that day are people as child survivors of the transport. Together with the camera we follow the moved faces of the listeners, their impressions, their tears.
Here, the recipient – whether a resident of a refugee centre listening to Syrian pop music on a daily basis, an old concentration camp survivor or a North Korean refugee – is a more important character than the virtuoso himself, the pianist usually being the centre of attention and the cameras.
‘This is a film to listen to, watch and feel’ – describes the director, Joanna Kaczmarek.
The makers of the poignant documentary looked at the significance of our backgrounds, lifestyles, age, education, experiences in terms of how we feel about music. ‘It turned out that inside we are all the same’ – says Joanna Kaczmarek, whose first film was also about music.
The film Chopin. I Am Not Afraid of Darkness was produced in collaboration with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
Translated by Patryk Grabowski
