Manic Bookstore Cafe

The first thing I did when I arrived in Poland two weeks ago was to go to a polling place. It was Sunday, there were presidential elections, and my friend needed to vote before we went to a concert in the evening. There were a lot of names on that election list! She was undecided as she entered her old elementary school: should she vote for the current president, who at least has an administration in place? Should she register a protest vote in disgust over the lack of decent candidates and return the entire ballot with names struck out? Much as she might have wanted to express her disgust, it was not in her interest to do so -- if no clear winner emerged after the first round, she reasoned, there would be a second round, and the cost of the polling would come out of the state budget, and therefore the taxpayers' pockets. In the end, turnout was even  less than usual , under 50%, and those voters were split. The winner was Andrzej Duda, who at 42 has the tight skin of a ...

Kinoteka in the Palace of Culture Last week I attended 13 films at the DOCs Against Gravity film festival in Warsaw. Kinoteka, pictured at right, became my home. It may be that I actually attended more  films in 2013 when I was here, since I became very interested in a Belorussian director who was being featured. Nonetheless, thirteen was an amazing experience -- I saw films made by Finns and Chileans, Italians and Norwegians, Croatians who studied film in the Soviet Union, Poles who had emigrated to Britain, and an American who spent three years riding trains while working on his PhD in anthropology in China. Films about Ukraine, and Argentina, and Russia. It was a truly international experience -- especially because of the beloved Polish tradition of the spotkanie  -- meetings with directors, and in some cases with the actors featured in the films. In each screening room a moderator and a translator led discussions after the films, and it was interesting to hear the di...

This evening I saw a pretty amazing film at the Warsaw DOCs against Gravity festival -- a documentary by a Finnish filmmaker about Alexander Sokurov. Sokurov during filming of "Voice of Sokurov" Photo credit: Christine Kalshnikova You may know Sokurov from his most famous film in the U.S., the 96-minute 2002 film about Russian history filmed in one take at the Hermitage Museum. But Sokurov is much more than that -- a lyrical and contemplative filmmaker, intensely humanistic, whose early films were shelved but who "came out" in the period of perestroika with many wonderful fictional and documentary films and who has been producing films regularly ever since. I think I may only have seen Russian Ark  and Mother and Son , but I now have a list a mile long of films I want to see, including a very early one subtitled "peasant elegy" about a Russian woman named Maria. Currently Sokurov (according to filmmaker Leena Kilpeläinen) is persona non grata  ...

Here is the Palace of Culture -- in the tradition of me not knowing how to take a selfie The Warsaw Film Festival has a new name -- "Against Gravity." One of the main venues is Kinoteka , housed in the Palace of Culture (beloved, or hated, depending on whom you ask). I find Kinoteka  at any rate to be fantastic -- eight different screens with an elegant lobby and intimate cafe spaces on either side. Today I saw two documentaries, one a French film called "Ashes" and the other a Norwegian film about Poland called "I am Kuba." Both, in the end, are about family and being foreign, and both ask questions about the process of making documentaries while themselves being documentaries. Perhaps that's what a documentary film festival is supposed to be about? "Ashes" follows a woman who has gone to Paris to attend her mother's funeral. Her mother Kyoko, it turns out, was born in Japan, near Hiroshima, and when in 1945 her older sister...

From my mother's front yard (in Virginia) this year Years ago I was out in the Russian countryside with some friends, the youngest of which was five. I was still learning the Russian language and didn't know many of the words she knew, which confused her. We came upon a flowering tree and I asked: "What's this tree called?" She was stunned. "You don't know what cherëmukha is?" It was like there was something wrong with me, or maybe it was my idea of a joke? For this little Russian girl, the cherry tree was akin to mushrooms, or camomile, or 22-kopek loaves of white bread: a part of the world in which she lived. The fact that I didn't know these things really marked me as the foreigner I obviously was. I wonder, sometimes, whether there weren't many flowering trees where I grew up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. Crabapples I remember, but not much else. We memorized the pin oak leaf and the maple leaf in science class in elem...