Award-winning actress Kasia Smutniak’s directorial debut is both an intimate homecoming to her native Poland and a re-examination of its past and present, as well as an investigation into her country’s current migrant crisis.
Her itinerary, an uncertain and risky journey into the red zone where media access is restricted, begins in front of a wall that is being built by the government to keep people out, and ends in front of another wall from the past, that of Łódź’s infamous Jewish Ghetto that was built by an invading country to keep people in. The film has been playing in TIFF Docs at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Smutniak had been following the crisis on the Polish/Belarusian border since August 2021, just after the fall of Kabul, and heard about 35 refugees trapped in the wild and dangerous Białowieża forest. “There was a group of families with kids, pregnant women or elderly people, sick people… And even though they were asking to live in Poland, they were unable to enter, and right away the government created a fence between them and the activists or the people that actually wanted to help them. So, they were there without food, water or shelter.”
The director asked her friend, Italian reporter Diego Bianch (Propaganda Live), if he was interested in covering the story. “Fifteen minutes of the reportage went live on Italian television. This is how the news of the situation spread in Italy,” Smutniak recounts. She decided, however, against reportage as an approach to her own story. “I’m not a journalist. I’m not a reporter. I’m just a regular citizen that is trying to understand what is going on,” she says, which maybe explains the emotional impact of the interviews she conducts with survivors and activists who describe being beaten by border guards, mutilated by wild animals and denied all claim to asylum.
Smutniak admits to using social media not only to follow the crisis, but also to get a better and more “truthful” depiction of the situation, such as following reporters and activists who are just “regular people” in the red zone. “That was a very interesting experience because that also helped me to get in touch with the people there. And I kept those relationships that sometimes I started building throughout the months before I started shooting,” she explains.
At first, Smutniak questioned whether she was best placed to make the film. “From a personal perspective, I’m Polish, but from the perspective of someone telling such a traumatic story, like the geopolitical background, I didn’t have the tools. I didn’t know how to do it. Do I have the right to do it? But no-one [else] was doing it at the time,” she says, and therefore she felt compelled to persevere.
Later, the Polish government was forced to create a “free” communication space, so they allowed certain journalists in to see what is happening, “It’s so far away from what free media means and what the rights of free media actually are in a democratic country. So, the only way to enter that zone was to officially be a journalist, put yourself on the list and try to get in officially.”
“Or to not be a journalist and try to enter using a different way,” she adds.
And find ways she did, by playing on the inherent prejudices of the authorities. “Maybe because I’m a woman and…an actress, and that fact was completely underestimated [as to] what my intentions were, and what I can actually do while being there,” she stresses ironically.
The process of sifting through the mass of material in the editing room was very difficult and emotionally jarring. “It just breaks you. The amount of terror, the amount of tragedy, it’s overwhelming. And when it’s overwhelming, you don’t get connected with it,” she reveals of how she was able to continue.
“And I kept it [the film] secret after I finished the whole editing process, which took me nine months, just because I was not sure if legally, I’d be able to finish this,” she adds of late reservations she had to overcome.
The experience on directing the film altered the way Smutniak will choose her future acting projects . “I cannot, at this moment, share my time to tell stories that are frivolous. Something has really deeply changed my perception of what I’m doing and how I relate to film,” she says.
Walls is the second film dealing with the refugee crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border screening at TIFF. Fellow Pole Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border was recently awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, and also been screening at TIFF.
Why are female directors specifically tackling this subject? “I think we’re just stronger. I think that the risk for us, once you take the path of ‘Fuck, I’m doing it,’ is something we just have [in us]…She called me her partner in crime,” Smutniak states of her kinship with Holland.
The second wall in the film is in front of Smutniak’s grandparents’ house in Łódź, where she played as a child. It is the wall of the Nazi ghetto where Jews and Roma were forced to live under the German occupation of Poland during World War II. Trying to reconcile herself with her past, Kasia returns home with a strong awareness. “It’s also the place that keeps their memory. Even though you don’t belong to that place, suddenly something clicks and you just suddenly recognize things. You just tune into that story,” she concludes.
