Filmpräsentation: Nightmares & Wall and Tower

Film Presentation
´Nightmares´ and ´Wall and Tower´
Two films by Yael Bartana
Introduction: Slawomir Sierakowski

The leftist activist Slawomir Sierakowski strides into an empty and dilapidated Warsaw stadium and delivers a startling call: "Let the 3,000,000 Jews that Poland has missed… return to Poland, to your country."

The film Nightmares (Mary Kozmary), with Sierakowski as its main character, explores the complicated set of social and political relationships among Jews, Poles, and other Europeans in the age of globalization. Using the structure and sensibility of a World War II propaganda film, Nightmares addresses contemporary anti-Semitism and xenophobia in Poland, the longing for the Jewish past among liberal Polish intellectuals, the desire of a new generation of Poles to be fully accepted as Europeans, and the Zionist dream of a return to Israel.

In the second film, Wall and Tower (Mur I Weiza), "pioneers" played by Israeli and Polish volunteers dressed as Jewish immigrants to Palestine in the 1930s answer Sierakowski’s call and build a settlement in a park on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto. The film suggests how the movement of Jewish settlers from Europe to Palestine was a scripted one, as artificial in its way as the return of Israelis to Europe would be. More trenchantly, it indicates that Israel, trapped in the conflicts with its Arab neighbors, has become a jail, confining its citizens in a self-reinforcing dynamic of isolation and confrontation out of synch with contemporary reality.

Bartana’s films offer a detached, critical, yet undeniably poetic reflection on the complex relationship between the individual and its national identity.

Title: Nightmares
Country: Israel 2007
Languages: Polish with English subtitles
Director: Yael Bartana
Runtime: 10 minutes

Title: Wall and Tower
Country: Israel, the Netherlands, Poland 2009
Languages: Polish/Hebrew with English subtitles
Director: Yael Bartana
Runtime: 16 minutes

Slawomir Sierakowski is Editor-in-chief of Krytyka Polityczna, Warsaw, and currently Visiting Fellow at the IWM.