Report of the exhibition in Gothenburg. Visit "News" section

Report of the exhibition in Tel Aviv. Visit "News" section

March 68. Farewells and returns. Documentary workshops
The acts of mass anti-Semitism, initiated and organised in Poland in March 1968 by the Communist regime and the ensuing emigration of many thousands of Polish citizens of Jewish origin, are to this date one of the most paramount burdens straining Polish-Jewish relations. It is common knowledge, that in the times of Communist Poland, these events were taboo. Since 1989 they have been a subject of systematic research by historians striving to put the facts in order and determine their relatively consistent and objective interpretation. However, this is not sufficient, as there is an enormous realm of emotions, cumulated over the years, which yearn to be expressed today in a form different than matter-of-fact historical accounts.

This projects concerns precisely this painful realm of private memories and emotions. Its main idea is for a group of Polish and Israeli students to work together in a few workshop sessions. Under the direction of experienced documentary authors they could find the inspiration to discover and then work on processing archival materials, as well as reach eyewitnesses of the events of that time. The workshop participants’ search would focus on, among other things: amateur films and photographs documenting the most dramatic events (e.g. farewells at the Dworzec Gdański railway station in Warsaw), letters sent between pairs of friends, Poles and Jews, continued from 1968 until this very day, as well as reports of Polish security services, which had been regularly monitoring the exchange of correspondence between Poland and Israel as part of society surveillance activities. An extremely important element of the students’ work is also obtaining personal accounts of people who directly took part in those events.

The materials collected by the students will serve as a building block for their individual works falling within the scope of broadly understood art of fact: ranging from documentaries or short stories to radio, photo or video documents. The most interesting materials will also be used in the making of a film documentary, directed by Maciej Drygas, dedicated to the fate of Poles and Jews, whose friendships survived in spite of the raging forces of history.

The aim of the project

The project consists of organising a series of journalism-archiving workshops, conducted by filmmakers, writers, historians, as well as journalists and photographers from Poland and Israel with students from both countries participating. The workshops will be taking place in Poland and Israel, in cooperation with Warsaw, Kraków, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv universities. The works prepared by the students which shall be presented during the Polish Year in Israel, will aim at making the public opinion acquainted with these complex problems, contributing new information to the historical debate, but above all, to commit the young people participating, to the issues of Polish-Jewish dialogue. The assembled materials shall make up an archive of the project, which following its completion, shall be handed over to the Karta Center in Warsaw.

Organisers

The authors of the project are Maciej Drygas and Mateusz Werner. Viola Wein is the coordinator of organization of workshops in Israel, while Artur Liebhart (Against Gravity) is their executive producer.
Project organized by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the Polish Year in Israel 2008/2009.
Project financed from the means of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland.
www.poland-israel.org

Dates

Preparation period – August-November 2006
A series of 3 workshops – December 2006 – December 2007
Completion of work on student projects – March 2008
Presentation of student works – May 29th to June 21st 2008, Horace Richter Gallery, Tel Aviv
Creation of the project archive in the Karta Center (Warsaw) – summer 2008


Authors of the project

Maciej J. Drygas
Born in 1956 in Łódź. Graduate of the Directing Department of the Moscow All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography (WGIK). Director of documentaries and radio dramas. Immediately after his studies, he was an assistant to Krzysztof Zanussi and Krzysztof Kieślowski. He debuted as a documentary director with a piercing morality play, the film Usłyszcie mój krzyk (Hear My Cry), which won many awards at festivals all around the world. His second film Stan nieważkości (Weightless), which speaks of  „human”  costs of the space conquest, met with a similar success. He is now the director of the radio drama section of the Reportage Laboratory at Warsaw University.

Filmography
1991 Usłyszcie mój krzyk (Hear My Cry)
1994 Stan nieważkości (Weightless) (Prix Italia '94; Grand Prix at the Media Festival in Łódź, 1994; First prize at the Balticum Film and Television Festival in Bornholm, 1995; Grand Prix at the International Monte-Carlo TV Festival, 1995; Prix Europa’95; First Prize at the International Film Festival in Strasbourg, 1995; Grand Prix and Press Award at the Ismailia Festival For Documentary And Short Films, 1995)
2002 Głos nadziei (Voice Of Hope)
2005 Jeden dzień w PRL (One Day In People’s Poland) (Silver Dragon at the national competition of the Cracow Film Festival, 2006)

Mateusz Werner
Mateusz Werner - PhD, Doctor of Humanities, a graduate of the Polish Language and Literature department at Warsaw University and the School of Social Sciences at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of The Polish Academy of Science. Junior Fellow of the Vienna Institute of Human Sciences. Film and literature critic. Co-creator and compere of film programs for Polish public television: „The Picture Show” (TVP Channel 2) and „Half-seriously” (TVP Channel 1). For several years he programmed and managed the Gallery of Film Arts at the Zacheta Exhibition Hall in Warsaw. Co-organized and managed the Film Department at the Adam Mickiewicz Institute where he currently works as a film program curator. Contributes to the film journals „Film”, „Kino”.