_{Obsada by Wendelien van Oldenborgh}

Obsada is fascinating and thought-provoking in equal measure, and visually stimulating. Like many such films, it arose out of an acute sense of curiosity. In 2021 Berlin-based Dutch director and visual artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh was exhibiting in the Muzeum Sztuki, in the Polish city of Łódź. The museum curators suggested that she create a new work with their backing. As Łódź is also the home to the national film school, why not therefore collaborate with some of the school’s talents on a new work?

After her experience on her previous film Hier. - in which young women examine colonial history and contemporary society through music, poetry and dialogue, all set against the backdrop of Museum Arnhem’s renovation - she decided to revisit the theme in the new commission. “I was interested in young women getting ready for life,” van Oldenborgh remembers. “And I wondered about women who were getting on at the film school, how do they feel about their future? How did they feel about their chances? That was my curiosity. So I thought it would be interesting to have the female students from the film school set up a crew and them being the cast in the same time, because the film would be about them.”

And that is what happens. A cast/crew of female directors, screenwriters and actors gather to create and to reflect, much of the time in the museum space, and at others within the exact film place where their radical and experimental (and mainly male) counterparts worked in 1973, almost a half century before, developing an agenda for new Polish cinema.

The women’s existential and heartfelt navel-gazing at times focuses on their upbringing within post-1989 Poland where the influence of, and opportunities offered to, women rapidly diminished. “I was raised to think that I do not know things,” says one. “Girls tend to continually over-educate and underestimate themselves,” says another. “Who am I to be making stories?” asks a third.

All this is presented in contrast to the opportunities and sense of opportunity their mothers and grandmothers enjoyed, as the young women outline. Van Oldenborgh illustrates their dilemma with reference to pre-1989 attitudes in the country, which seemed altogether more progressive. “MeToo and all this may have given strength to a younger generation, but on the other hand what we talked about and what was actually most interesting to me is that Poland was the first country with legal abortion in the 1950s. Because it was Socialist and a lot of women were in the parliament. Also, because of after the war there were fewer men so they [women] managed to get through new laws in the fifties.” This included the easing of divorce legislation which enabled women to claim alimony more easily, van Oldenborgh points out. Even with that in place, and strong resistance movements in the workplace, selective history writing covered up a lot of women’s narratives, she adds.

Within this context, the contemporary women’s further reflections are both instructive and provocative, and suggest that future modus operandi in the film industry must be less patriarchal, less director-led and altogether more collaborative. The dilemma is articulated beautifully by Paulina the sound recordist, who also trained as a midwife. In the maternity ward the same model applies, she pointed out. During a birth, the midwives do all the hard work before a doctor (a lot of the time male) comes in, signs everything off, and leaves. That is not a system they wish to encourage in their future film work.

The women therefore talk change, bemoaning a hierarchy within the film world that paradoxically leads to abrogation of responsibility further down the line as the main decisions on set have already been taken. They refer to an “abusive system that is beginning to break down.” What is more there should be less tolerance of ego. “It is not about personal fulfilment,” says one, “it is about the thing I want to say. So I find people who also want to say it and we talk about it together.”

Obsada is experimental in form as the camera follows the women’s deliberations, sometimes at a distance or from a high vantage point. At other times the women assume mannered shapes as they articulate their thoughts. And there is judicious use of reflections and colour, which contrasts the monochrome archive of the male filmmakers from 1973.

In one visually arresting scene they hold and manipulate large sheets of coloured semi-transparent plexiglass within the museum, a process which makes for telling metaphor as it effects vivid and radical change both to the women and their surroundings.
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