Still: Grandmamauntsistercat - Zuza Banasińska

While taking part in a research programme at the Essay Film Studio in the Polish Film School, gaining access to materials from the Educational Film Studio in Łódź’s archive, intrepid young filmmaker and artist Zuza Banasińska came across hundreds of hours of footage depicting life in Communist-era Poland. These ranged from street scenes to material shot in hospitals (sometimes even inside patients’ bodies).

“The footage is so varied. There were pieces that were almost like experimental film, and there are also typically educational videos,” the director notes.  

Banasińska was both fascinated and alarmed by the archival snippets which were, on the face of it, certainly very well made.

“It was a pleasure to watch many of them. They’re not only very beautifully shot but also very experimental in many ways, including avant-garde musical pieces and art performances. It really seems that they [the filmmakers] were using this opportunity to try things out.”

Nonetheless, there was an underlying chauvinism verging on misogyny behind much of the material. For instance, some fragments were very prescriptive about how women should look, dress and behave, treating them, along with the filmed animals and organisms, as specimens subjected to vivisections and scrutiny. Many of the films were clearly filmed by men - and the voice-overs were usually by men too. The director found this to be “filled with an often blatantly sexist and anthropocentric perspective of an all-knowing and disembodied male subject.”

The footage has been commandeered and re-purposed by Banasińska in the short film Grandmamauntsistercat which had its world premiere at International Film Festival Rotterdam before screening in the Berlinale Forum Expanded. 

“I wanted to tell the story from the side of the Other - and to look for sites of resistance in these images,” Banasińska explains the strategy. The filmmaker has deliberately distorted some of the footage, making it seem as if women’s faces as well as other parts of the images are blurring and stretching in response to “this constant oppression that is looming over their world.”

The director grew up in Warsaw in the 1990s in a fiercely matriarchal family in which the women always came first - hence the title ‘grandmama, aunt, sister, cat…’ 

Banasińska’s mother is a literary translator, the aunt is a chemistry teacher, the grandmother is the boss of it all - and most of the men have either died or left.

“I grew up with all these women who took care of me and my sister and protected us from this patriarchal reality…there was a lot of shutting out of the external world which created a dissonance and a tension.”

The film takes a child’s eye view of the world it depicts. The child is trying “to make meaning out of these images,” glueing them together. An ironic voice-over refers to the prehistoric goddess Baba Yaga who is transformed by “patriarchal Christianity” into a “witch who kidnaps and eats children.”

This was home-made filmmaking.

“Basically me in front of the computer, recording the voice-over myself and writing it as I was editing…it was a very intimate process. The funding came at a later stage.”

Banasińska is already at work on a new archive-based project, Kontrewers*, expected to premiere later this year. It’s set in a small village whose name translates as “dispute over a borderland” and features dinosaur footprints and stones with mysterious neolithic carvings. It combines documentary elements with a strong experimental strain.

Later this year, Banasińska will have an exhibition in Amsterdam. Titled Double Double, it is being put together with artist Myrto Vratsanou in Punt WG, and is about “doubles in cinema and in virtual worlds.”

The filmmaker is now based in Amsterdam, having come to the Netherlands to do a Masters at the Sandberg Institute in 2019. They have stayed in the country ever since.

“I think definitely the Dutch society is way more open [than Poland] in terms of discussing issues of gender,” the director reflects. “I am myself a non-binary person and I feel that here it is quite accepted…but I think this patriarchal society I describe is not limited to Poland.”

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*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund