Friday     10:00
Municipal Theatre of Marienbad
2024, 23 min, DCP, Poland, Polish with English subtitles

Director: Zuza Banasińska 
Writer: Zuza Banasińska 
Producer: Zuza Banasińska 
Production Company: Zuza Banasińska
Coproducer: Wytwórnia Filmów Oświatowych w Łodzi (Educational Film Studio in Łódź) 
Editing: Zuza Banasińska 
Sound Recording: Zuza Banasińska 
Sound Editing: Zuza Banasińska, Constanza Castagnet 
Music: Martyna Basta, Julek Tarasiuk 
Special Effects: Zuza Banasińska 

Film created from archival materials of the Educational Film Studio in Łódź, tells the story of a matriarchal family through the eyes of a child grappling with the reproduction of ideological and representational systems. Originally created as didactic and propagandist tools in communist Poland, the footage is repurposed as a locus of auto-fictional memories, with their scientific register shifted towards a treatment of images themselves as specimens. 
The classic Slavic witch figure, Baba Jaga, is reimagined as a 'prehistoric goddess from the times of the matriarchy'. This transformation incites layered reflections on kinship and identity, as the child navigates binary gender roles. The women in the family find home within the archive, engaging in a process of self- and world-making, overturning the often sexist and anthropocentric images into tools of freedom and resistance.

Zuza Banasińska (they/them/she/her) is an artist and filmmaker from Warsaw, currently based in Amsterdam. In their essay films and installations, they use archives to examine how the reproduction of images enables the reproduction of systems, subjects and bodies. 
They studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, at the University of the Arts in Berlin, and at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. Their newest film, Grandmamauntsistercat premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam 2024 and the 74th Berlinale, where it received the Teddy Award for best short film. It has now screened at over 70 film festivals, including New York Film Festival, Visions du Réel, winning 13 awards, most recently at the Festival du Nouveau Cinema in Montréal. It was also nominated for the European Short Film Awards and the Doc Alliance award.