While the communist authorities decide the conditions for an official registration of the Solidarność movement inside, the masses demonstrate in front of the court outside. A contemporary document of the moment when the power of the people seemed to make a lasting cultural opening no longer just a promise but a possibility. At the time, “undesirable” at the Leipzig festival.

Everything goes downhill. For whom? Marian Cholerek leaves that to the audience. After all, there was no way he could tell his story about a joint action of alleged oppositional forces in 1979 unequivocally. His years of work on animated series for children and his penchant for erotically charged humour, however, are unmistakeable. A cheerfully subversive children’s film for adults.

Shortly before the fall of the Wall, tens of thousands of GDR citizens fled to the West, most of them via Hungary. Many ended up stranded in the West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw. Refugees from the GDR were interviewed in Poland, speaking openly and emotionally of their fates. The footage was forgotten and only re-discovered 20 years later.

It is said of Krzysztof Kieślowski that he did not see himself as a political filmmaker. At least this early documentary casts doubt on this, for it depicts the cold stranglehold of bureaucracy. The setting is a municipal funeral home in Warsaw. Phone calls are made, documents checked and stamped. Business runs like clockwork, from the cradle to the grave.
Leipzig naturally maintained ties with older Polish documentarists like Jerzy Bossak, even after he relocated to Denmark. The fact that Kieślowski and other notable Polish film artists of his generation did not appear in the programmes before 1990 fits into the image of a life consumed by pettiness painted here. The real issue was probably animosities with the festival in Cracow.

“No freedom without dwarves!” What form of oppositional logic can take hold when nothing is logical anymore? “The Orange Alternative” has answers. When living conditions in communism reach the threshold of the surreal, the protest movement that sprang from student circles decides to subvert the order of the regime by Dadaist artistic interventions.

Poznań, June 1956: For a long time, the “forgotten uprising” in which dozens of people lost their lives was a taboo in Poland. It was only in the mid-1980s, in a period of liberalisation, that Marek Drążewski could make this astonishingly frank review, in which he condenses the dramatic events using private photos, footage and memories of contemporary witnesses.

Ten years after the bloody suppression of the workers’ uprisings, the dead are commemorated in front of the Gdańsk shipyard in 1980. The memorial service conceived by Andrzej Wajda could only be documented after sustained pressure. The resulting montage, which links images of the event with emotional reports by contemporary witnesses, was never supposed to be.