My Country So Beautiful + In the Street – Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

My Country So Beautiful

• Grzegorz Paprzycki documents the spread of far-right attitudes in Poland and the reactions of those who fervently oppose them. He shows us a place where social polarization takes the form of an open conflict. But his film is about more than just demonstrations and riots. He also shows us the educational efforts undertaken by defenders of constitutional democracy and their challenging attempts at dialogue; although this time of an acute crisis in the rule of law does not seem conducive to such efforts, they are needed today more than ever.

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In the Street

• Robert Kowalski's film will go down in the history of Polish documentary cinema as one of the most important pieces of early evidence of a new phenomenon in the social life of the Third Polish Republic: street protests movements. Initiated by the Committee for the Defence of Democracy’s mass demonstrations after the government’s attack on the Constitutional Trybunal, street protests take a variety of forms and have a large number of actors, from great protest leaders like Paweł Kasprzak of Obywatele RP, to those who, like Beata Katkowska, have the courage to protest alone. Kowalski also shares the voices of Klementyna Suchanow, Rafał R. Suszek, Nadia Kłos, and Dawid Winiarski. One thing that is extremely important for the future is that, thanks to Kowalski’s work, OKO.press has been recording and analyzing the crisis of constitutional democracy in Poland at the audiovisual level as well.

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