f o rewo rd
On October 21, 2010, True/False’s screening commit- tee huddled around a small television and watched At the Edge of Russia, a film directed by a then-unknown twenty-something Pole named Michał Marczak. Michał’s film observes a group of Russian soldiers stationed in a remote part of Siberia. Their mission is to protect the border from Arctic Ocean threats. Outside of the context of a documentary festival, many viewers would assume Michał’s Waiting for Godot-esque comedy to be a work of fiction. Every composition is perfect, every laugh feels carefully timed, and the film is built on a neatly constructed narrative. Michał considers his film a work of nonfiction cinema, however, and it screened almost exclusively at documentary events, including True/False. After our committee watched the film, we fiercely
debated its documentary claims. That debate contin- ues to this day. In November 2012, the formidable Sean Farnel—a Canadian programmer who included the film in the 2011 edition of Hot Docs—wrote an article for Indiewire in which he accused Michał of being “dishon- est” for labeling his film a documentary. The 2015 edition of Neither/Nor, which focuses on
Polish documentary visionaries of the 1970s–1990s, can be traced back to this 2010 argument. As you will see, Michał’s film can be viewed as part of a rich Polish
tradition. Before releasing At the Edge of Russia, Michał studied under documentary legend Marcel Łoziński at the Andrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing. Marcel describes the world as a fish tank and suggests that it’s his job as director to shake that fish tank—i.e., provoke truth, often through staging—and document what happens. Marcel’s profound and mischievous work is explored in this series, as are films assembled by Dorota Wardęszkiewicz, the editor of At the Edge of Russia. At the beginning of her career, Dorota worked alongside the late Wojciech Wiszniewski, considered one of the fathers of Polish creative documentary. In the years since, she has collaborated with some of Poland’s most innovative documentary directors. These artists—along with other crucial figures, such
as Grzegorz Królikiewicz and Bogdan Dziworski—were born at the start of World War II and created many of their groundbreaking works as citizens of the commu- nist Polish People’s Republic (1944–1989). How and why did this staggeringly creative cinema emerge out of such a stifling system? Was it created in spite of that system or because of it? We’ve asked the astute and gifted film writer Ela Bittencourt to guide us through this astonish- ing, daunting, and frequently overlooked period of film history. Her tremendous work speaks for itself.
about ela bittencourt
ELA BITTENCOURT is a writer, critic and film programmer. She has written for a wide range of publications, including Artforum, Cineaste, Frieze Magazine, Film Quarterly, Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, Senses of Cinema and Reverse Shot, among others. She holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University, where she taught essay writing.
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