Institute History
Description
Far From Poland is the iconoclastic story of a filmmaker, a woman “steeped in the traditions of the Left,” determined to show the world the road to salvation through the “miracle” of the Polish Solidarity movement.
When denied visas to shoot in Poland, the filmmaker begins to construct a film in New York City which she calls Far From Poland. Over the barest bones of documentary footage, she drapes dramatic reenactments of Solidarity texts, formally composed vignettes and swatches of soap opera, to engage the audience in her personal definition of the Polish struggle. The result is a deft dismemberment of the myth of “documentary truth” and a startling expansion of the vocabulary of filmmaking. As one critic put it, Far From Poland is “exhilarating . . .Once and for all, the arbitrary and imaginary line between the documentary and the dramatic has been obliterated.”