Report from the Field: Warsaw's DOCs against Gravity

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 was killed by the atomic bomb, Kyoko decides she must escape Japan when she is old enough. She signs up as an assistant to a French documentarian, and eventually acts in some French New Wave films after moving with him to France. She travels back home to give birth to her daughter, but then raises Akiko abroad. We learn that Kyoko spoke to her daughter in English and was unable to connect with her emotionally; Akiko moved to Tokyo when she was in her early 20s. A foreigner in the countries where she has been living, she is also a foreigner in Japan. (Her family comments that she doesn't really understand Japanese culture and customs.)

Now, 16 years later, she returns to confront her mother's apartment, the things left behind by both her parents, and the question of her identity. Bringing the ashes back to Japan, she travels to her mother's childhood home (where she also was born) and meets with all her mother's siblings, dividing the ashes with them so that some part of Kyoko will remain in the family crypt.

Throughout the film, the director cuts back and forth between scenes of Akiko and her journeys and still photographs and scenes from Kyoko's youth -- possibly from documentary footage shot by Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau himself. From time to time Akiko reads aloud from her mother's diaries, one she started when her daughter was born and another when she knew she would die; Akiko also seeks people who might know about footage her father shot in Tokyo and Hiroshima from a film he does not seem to have completed.

The mother's journey starts, in a way, because Kyoko's own parents go to Hiroshima in 1945 to try to find their older daughter who was at school there, and return with nothing. She perished. The parents continue their lives and have more children, but Kyoko moves into the world and returns only as ashes in a black resin urn. The relatives, during the ceremony to divide the remains, comment that there aren't even any pieces of bone left -- Kyoko has been turned into dust. But what has her daughter been left with? Unanswered questions, missing documentary footage, and her very own portion of dust. We might say "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" -- but where does that leave Akiko?

Why "Against Gravity"? I will figure this out...

"Jestem Kuba" sounds like it will be a political film -- and the filmmaker, Åse Svenheim Drivenes, asserted in the post-screening session that it is. However, it is not at all about Cuba. Kuba is the nickname of the 12-year-old Jakub, who along with his younger brother is a "Euro-orphan" -- i.e. children left behind when their parents seek work outside their homeland. I was utterly engrossed in the film, especially as the children live in a typical two room apartment furnished by IKEA. Kuba's room reminded me very much of my 12-year-old son's room when we were in Poland, and I was able to compare Kuba's need to be the responsible big brother (desperately trying to get Mikołaj to eat something other than potato chips, for example, or to wash himself before going to bed) to what I know a 12-year-old boy really wants and needs to do -- to eat (chips, and candy bars, and basically anything he can get his hands on), to have time alone, and to sleep 12 and 15 hours a day.

The title refers to the director's main idea -- to shed light on the problem of gastarbeiter by showing the experience from the point of view of the child. Kuba turns 13 during the film, and we see him acting grown-up with his brother, like a little child with his parents (whom he cuddles and from whom he seeks caresses when they come back briefly to Poland), like a cool kid who doesn't care about anything with his friends -- until he eventually gets in trouble for acting out in school and committing vandalism. His parents have to attend a hearing and are threatened with having their parental rights terminated unless they change their living situation. {Spoiler alert} Eventually the mother takes the children with her to Vienna to live while she works there as a house cleaner.

It was amazing, then, to have Kuba in the cinema after the screening. But as we talked and asked him and the director questions (and as the director got more-or-less harangued by a Polish social worker, who insisted that she should have shown the system and its failures), I wondered about documentary making. This film crew was in the apartment with Kuba and Mikołaj while the parents were abroad. What does it mean to document their travails, to be adults present when 8-year-old Mikołaj refuses to eat his cereal (or indeed anything but potato chips)?

I asked the director why she had framed the film as she did; essentially for the first half the viewer thinks that this is a family of three, and that the father has left them to their fates. (It is explained that the parents are divorced and the father lives in the UK.) Later it turns out that he, too, loves his children.  But by leaving him out of the first half of the film, the impression is that this problem is the mother's problem, that he has no responsibility toward the boys he left behind. (I also asked her whether she thought the film would have been more powerful if it didn't have a happy ending. But that, I think, would have involved truly unethical behavior on the part of the filmmakers.)

The social worker was also unhappy with how the family was depicted in the film. By making the film about Poland (it ends with a statement: 100,000 children in Poland live alone while their parents work abroad), the film fits a narrative that is apparently prevalent in Poland -- that selfish women are abandoning their families to make money and focus on themselves. The director insisted that she was using Poles as an example, and that she will take the film to UNICEF and the people in the European Commission concerned with child welfare, that this is indeed about "Euro-orphans" and applies equally to the situation in Ukraine and Moldova and Romania.

Portrait of Kuba

As we continued to talk, I was watching Kuba. In the end I asked him whether he thought he would return to Poland when he grows up, and whether he was interested in being an actor. (He was quite natural on screen.) Yes, he hopes to return, and he says he would like to become a policeman.

I wonder -- a policeman who helps to protect children such as himself, and to prosecute parents who cannot find a way to prosper economically in their homeland?