Film directed by Agnieszka Zwierfka – “Trees are silent” – he won in his category At the prestigious Slamdance festival in Los Angeles, winning Breakouts feature grand jury prize. This year’s race was attended by films, including from Greece, Germany, China, Canada, Norway or Japan.
The film is an amazing combination of documentary cinema and animation. All fragments showing the family’s journey through the Białowieża Forest are shown in the form of animated rune drawings, which, sketching, coped with trauma in this way.
The main heroine of the film is Runa, a 16-year-old Kurdish who, escaping with the family from Iraq, goes to the Polish-Belarusian border. Her mother, being in advanced pregnancy, dies in the hospital as a result of exhaustion and conditions that prevailed in the border forest. Now the rune must grow up at an accelerated pace – it’s her He becomes the head of his family to look after four younger brothers and a father who cannot cope with growing difficulties.
The case was widely heard in Poland and in the world. Agnieszka Zwierfka met a family freshly after a tragedy in a refugee center and a special bond fulfilled between them, thanks to which a film was made, and the family found peace and a safe house in Sopot, where she lives today thanks to the support of the city.
The director in an interview with Artur Zaborski for Interii talks about the reception of the film in the United States, where “Trees are silent” rhyme with current political discussions about immigrants illegally staying in the country.
“Driving here, I thought we made a European film, so it is something strange that we are here. (…) It turns out that in the Trump era this film is understood here very well (…) and we probably made an American film because We had a show in the room for 250 people and this room was crying. It was something amazing to hear how many people cry out loud in your film, “says Agnieszka Zwierfka.
“This is a really incredibly warm party, but also surprisingly warm, because in my imagination American and European cinema is two different planets,” says the director of the document.
“This is definitely one of those factors that we’ve found the right historical time,” he adds in an interview with Artur Zaborski for Interia.
Agnieszka Zawfka is One of the most valued Polish documentary cinema directors. For over 12 years she cooperated with TVP as the author of many awarded television programs and short documentary forms. After graduating from the doctorate in 2007 she became a lecturer at the University of Wrocław. In 2010, she founded the Chilli Productions production company. Since then, he has been implementing creative documents. She is the author of the films “Albert Cinema” (2013), “Queen of Silence” (2014) or “Vika!” (2023).
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