Magdalena Szymków: My House Without Me
Sometimes, and maybe it happens more often with Polish short documentaries than with films from other countries, you sit after a fine film experience and say to yourself, ahhh it could have been longer, which is maybe the best compliment you can give a film, as the common sentence after a film is the opposite: too long, I was bored!
With Magdalena Szymków’s story – taken from the precise description on the site of the English producer – about two women, one house, an intimate story about a Pole and a German placed by war on enemy sides and their parallel lives accidentally brought together – I would have loved to have more, maybe a bigger film could be developed from this extraordinarily important theme of post-war Europe. We knew about the move of the border of Poland due to cynical big power´s politics, but it is the first time I have seen such an intelligent treatment of the subject as this one seen through the eyes of old women, whose memories are both informative and emotional.
Back to Polish short documentaries – and many of them come from the Wajda School – that often have this wonderful precise language with few words and a great impact on the visual interpretation. It’s all there in this film that also plays with double exposure of archive material to give support to the film’s memory flow.
For subscribers of the DOX Magazine – the film came with Number 96 on a dvd that also included Marcel Lozinski’s “Tonia and Her Children”.
http://www.vezfilm.org/storage/MyHouseWithoutMe_ENG_2.pdf
www.wajdastudio.pl/pl/filmografia/moj-dom
Poland, 2012, 28mins., Wajda School
