'HOME'

I have always been troubled by identity and cultural roots, I was raised on longing, longing for a paradise that does not exist… Although I was born in Poland, my family are one of those forcibly resettled after World War II in Silesia after originally living in what is now Ukraine, in Lviv. I grew up in a family that always had a longing for a past home we could not return.

The project began in 2008, as a unified Europe flourished. In 2016, with Brexit upon us, a script was assembled from the footage. The film was edited but then, in 2020, as sound design began, lockdown was imposed - a time of loneliness, isolation, journeys within ourselves, nostalgia, an aching need for connection and a return to home. Our first viewer and critic, Tadeusz Sobolewski, wrote: “… This film helped me to live in quarantine, with its strange beginnings. It was like the window drawn on the wall in Jarmusch's ‘Down by Law’. A window [that allows us] to leave the prison (…) This delicate film-diary sounded painful to me, but it also evoked a thought that we don’t want to let our private worlds be taken away. I don’t want to leave the house. I don’t want to take the future of the world on my shoulders. The world that is within our reach, close and ‘within our focus’ is important…”

No-one could ever have expected that the film’s final post-production and sound mix in 2022 would happen as a new era of war began in Europe; underlining the fragility of our world and home. Decades ago, my grandparents had to pack their belongings in Lviv and flee from home with their photographs, eiderdown and tango on vinyl 78s in their suitcases. Now history repeats itself.

I need to tell this story as an act of gratitude, to the place and to the people who gave me a ‘second childhood’ on this island and with whom I went through a process that allowed me to leave the house, after 7 years, with love. Apart from the implicit trust of my characters, with whom I shared the most intimate moments, the film could never have been made without the passion of a group of filmmakers: Cait Lyn, our creative producer; Rory, our executive producer; Terence, our editor and associate producer; as well as many others touched by the honesty our story.

The inspiration for ‘HOME’ was a photographic project ‘Rainbows’ which became an integral part of the film, separating the 4 chapters. The sections of the film are brought together using fragments of a book that had been inspired by Elizabeth’s house — ‘Southern Road’ by Ewa Ka — as well as the Narrator’s monologue. The whole is reminiscent of the narrative films of Jonas Mekas, including ‘As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty’. 

The mood may remind viewers of films in the tradition of ‘author cinema’ such as ‘Siberian Lesson’ by Wojtek Staroń in which the camera becomes “a tool to makes discoveries”. In our case I used a DSLR film and photo model using a 50mm fixed focal-length lens intended mainly for portraiture.
 
Parts of the interviews include making statements to the ‘participating, present camera’ is inspired by works of cinéma-vérité such as Lars von Trier’s ‘Dancer in the Dark’. 

The method also refers to a style called ‘direct cinema’, where instinct rules and the essence of the work depends on the film crew’s presence being discreet. The aim is to limit their interference and to achieve ‘screen truth’ as, for example, in Nick Broomfield’s ‘Who Cares?’ The Narrator, who holds the camera, participates in events and is part of the community. This creates a more intimate film and allows the viewer to enter deeply into the world of the author and to identify with her problems. 

The sound design is inspired by ‘Miniatury’, an album from one of the most original Polish composers, a pioneer of electronic and electroacoustic music, Eugeniusz Rudnik. The album was recorded between 1975-1995 and released by Requiem Records. Rudnik used collage technique, introducing elements from ‘scraps’, ‘rejects’ and ‘the un-pretty’, which also reflect the visual idea of the film edit. The technique emphasises authenticity and honesty; there are no continuity rules for sound, just as the visual structure of the film edit is non-linear. This method uses the same film language as Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Mirror’, which “unfolds as an organic flow of memories”. It embraces the camera’s own sounds, “in search of focus and clarity”, as a spine of the film, much as Rudnik uses background elements in his music.

The film is based on materials collected patiently over seven years, with reference to Paweł Łoziński’s method in ‘Sisters’. The editing is inspired by documentaries of Jacek Bławut which are constructed as feature films, such as ‘Born Dead’. Similarly, like Paweł Pawlikowski’s ‘Ida’, our story is told “poetically, symbolically by images that become a kind of meditation or prayer”.