“You don’t kill a million people for no reason”, a Polish official tells the ornithologist Anna. The scientist loses her temper. She screams at the man from the immigration office: “They died because of white assholes like you, the difference being that they studied at the Sorbonne”. Anna is fighting for the right of residence for a friend from Rwanda, who with her help narrowly escaped the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi minority. Or maybe friend is the wrong word. The two women are chained together in a kind of love-hate relationship: seeing the other seems to painfully conjure up the past.
The Polish directing couple Joanna Kos-Krauze and Krysztof Krauze succeed in making the trauma of the two women convincingly tangible. The cohesion of their reality seems broken, dissolved into fragments of perception. Over and over, the action takes place off-screen, while the camera focuses on incidental things, as if the film’s thoughts were elsewhere. Joanna and Krzysztof Krauze have worked together for more than 20 years and have received numerous prizes for their work. Krzysztof Krauze died during the making of the film. His wife had to complete it on her own. (svr)
