“Is it even conceivable to make a documentary film consisting not so much of documentary shots, as of fantasy, commentary, staging, fiction, melodrama?”—asked scholar Joanna Krakowska. One such work is Far from Poland, an experimental film by American director and theorist Jill Godmilow, whose work explores non-fiction cinema.

One of Godmilow’s key pieces, the film was inspired by the 1980 strike in the Gdańsk Shipyard and the beginnings of the Solidarity revolution. In August 1980, while working in Poland on a documentary about Jerzy Grotowski, Godmilow was surprised by the developments on the Baltic coast. When she returned to New York to seek funding for a new project about the workers’ revolt, she was denied a visa to re-enter Poland. “Having to cope without being able to be on the scene forced me to look for another way to tell this story,” she recalled. The experimental film was shot overseas, far from the country it depicts. It consists of interviews with Solidarity activist Anna Walentynowicz, a censor codenamed “K62,” and a miner, all originally published in 1981 in the Polish press and reenacted by actors, alongside staged conversations conducted by Godmilow, and documentary materials from the Shipyard and protests in New York.

Given the methodical blending of conventions, blurring the boundary between staging and documentation, and exposing the artificiality of certain scenes, Far from Poland problematizes the very nature of the film medium. It is also a work about the entanglement of an artist who wishes to convey the true history of Solidarity, to access the authentic human experience, and yet creates a film that undermines and challenges the possibility of such a narrative at every step, replacing reality with fiction or documentated performance. These features are characteristic of Godmilow’s entire oeuvre, which is situated at the intersection of film and art (she was nominated for an Oscar, and her works can be found in the collections of key American museums).

[S.M.]