Award-winning film director/producer Agnieszka Zwiefka (Chilli Productions) opened her pitch for the part-animated Polish/Danish Runa by asking the audience to imagine a series of scenarios, which escalated in terms of their dramatic impact. The project won the FIXAFILM Post-production Award.
“Imagine that you are a 16-year-old girl, that you love Billy Eilish, make-up and, of course, you’re a selfie queen of Instagram, as is every teen. But you are Kurdish living in Iraq, where Kurds, as the biggest world’s nation without a country, are being persecuted,” Zwiefka began her presentation. “Imagine that, every now and then, ISIS raids villages next to yours. Even last week, twelve kids were killed in one of these raids in Iraq.”
“Imagine that your parents take you and try to escape to the dreamland of Europe – or so they think. Imagine that you end up trapped for 10 days in a scary forest, and that you have never even seen trees before because there are no trees in Kurdistan where you live,” she continued.
“Imagine that your mother dies, freezes to death, and that you are left alone with four younger brothers and a desperate, helpless father who can’t even read and write. So from now on, you are the mother. And from now on, you are the one even responsible for legal procedures. This is the beginning of the story of our main protagonist. It’s a coming-of-age story, a quickly coming-of-age in the shadow of a global refugee crisis.”
Little by little, Runa’s status within the family becomes pre-eminent as she takes over the process of decision-making from her father. Should they apply for asylum in Poland or should they flee? How can she avoid a forced return to Iraq where Kurds are an ISIS target and an arranged marriage waits for her. Just as hope enters her life, as they move into an apartment and the kids get school places, she is diagnosed with glaucoma and may well go blind. All the time she draws in a sketch book, expressing what she feels inside.
“From the very first day she stayed in the refugee camp she had a sketchbook where she was drawing very disturbing things, trees swallowing people, spitting out bones, a girl on the verge of an abyss. That’s where an idea for an animation came, organically rooted in the language of our protagonist,” explained Zwiefka.
The director/producer discovered the story through her volunteer work on the Polish-Belarussian border. “That’s why we have very unique access to the lives of the family, but also we were the only film crew ever allowed to film in a refugee camp. We have also unique access to their emotional states. It was the family who asked us to film the funeral of the mother. It was not our intention. We’re always there in the most horrible moments of grief, but also in the happy times, so it’s not going to be a complete downer, I can promise you.” In the film, we see the brothers happy in their new school as well as Runa’s burgeoning ‘bestie’ relationship with her new friend Veronika, her learning of Polish and her developing desire to become a lawyer.
Zwiefka’s fellow producer on the film at Chilli Productions is Zofia Kujawska. The Kurdish/Polish/English-language film project has a mooted delivery date of 2024 and confirmed partners are Danish production company Real Lava, the Lower Silesia Film Fund, the Gdansk Film Fund and MX35. Zwiefka and Kujawska are looking to raise a further €150,000 towards the €250,000 budget. At Krakow, the pair were investigating financing, sales, broadcast and festival possibilities.
Zwiefka’s feature length debut The Queen of Silence (2014) premiered at IDFA before screening at numerous festivals, worldwide winning over 20 international awards.
