Opera o Polsce

One of the protagonists in this dense, creative documentary says to the camera, I feel helplessness, I feel outrage, I feel fear and anger. It is precisely these emotions that appear to be the foundation of Piotr Stasik's film, in which he shows Poland as a land in a trance, a provincial country drowning in mud and fog, part of the eternally dull East. The director's radical and provocative vision (he wrote the libretto for Opera About Poland along with Łukasz Czapski and Piotr Gruszczyński) extracts that which is repulsive and repetitive about Polish reality, while the atmosphere of monotony is subdued by Artur Zagajewski's hypnotic somnabulic music, which grows more powerful with every scene. Fragments from Andrzej Stasiuk's Dziennik pisany później (Journal Written Later), public opinion polls, sales ads, wedding announcements, and radio broadcasts create a polyphony from which the absurd "sermons" exhorted by Wojciech Kalarus stand out in the foreground. For if Poland is stuck in a vicious circle of its own incapacity, then, in Stasik's view, this is also the fault of our mindless religiosity, giving rise to kitsch, founded on suffering, drenched in contradictions. (New Horizons International Film Festival)