The director came to Poland in 1980 to shoot her film about Jerzy Grotowski With Jerzy Grotowski. Nienadówka 1980. A year later she filmed one of his para-theatre actions from the cycle Czuwania/Vigils.
Already at the time of the Gdańsk shipyard strikes that precipitated the Polish Solidarity she came up with the idea of making a film about the movement, but when she rushed home to New York to raise money for the production and take a camera crew back to Warsaw, they were denied visas. Undaunted by this, she decided to make the film in New York and hired American actors to re-enact interviews that were printed in Solidarity publications.
On that account, Far from Poland can be justifiably described as a documentary about Godmilow's attempts to make a documentary about the Solidarity movement. It is a personal collage-movie made up of fragments of dreams, autobiography and found footage. The liveliest sequences are re- enactments of interviews published in Poland in the late 80s. The actors, members of the Mabou Mines stage troupe include Ruth Maleczech, William Raymond and Mark Margolis. Maleczech plays the role of Anna Walentynowicz, the crane operator whose firing brought on the first Gdańsk strike. It is acted with a luminous solidity and stubborn passion which for a few moments illuminate the screen with real drama. And Raymond gives a sly, comic performance as a paranoid government censor known only as K-62. Additionally to fictionalized interviewees, in the film also appear actual Polish intellectuals living abroad at the time, such as Irena Grudzińska – Gross, Jan Tomasz Gross, Andrzej Tymowski and Elżbieta Matynia.
The floundering attempts to tell the story of Solidarity are framed with scenes of Godmilow revealing her self - doubt. We see her staring at the television news, chain smoking, asking herself questions about the proper role of a left-wing filmmaker. Her friends ask her if a truthful documentary about Solidarity would help or hurt the movement, and she asks herself if her first loyalty is to her profession as filmmaker, or to her politics as a socialist.
Far from Poland is an example of a self-conscious film that raises fundamental questions about its own procedures. It deconstructs both the historical narrative and the very form of the documentary combining many genres and film tricks.
The film has lived its own festival and academic life abroad for many years since its release. Yet, its official Polish premiere took place only on 25th April 2015 at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. The Screening of the film inaugurated the three-day retrospective of Jill Godmilow’s work including Antonia: Portrait of a Woman (1974), What Farocki Thought (1998), Roy Cohn / Jack Smith (1995). Godmilow is an Emeritus Professor in the Deptartment of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame
In recognition of her commitment to the democratic opposition in Poland and to Polish culture the President of Poland Bronisław Komorowski honored Jill Godmilow with the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland.
