Polish director Tomasz Wolski has carved a fruitful niche by excavating his nation’s film and TV archives to make collage documentaries which cast a playful, irreverent eye on dark chapters in Cold War history. In An Ordinary Country (2020) and 1970 (2021) he explored previously classified audio and video material from the vaults of the Polish security services, enhanced by stop-motion animation and subtle visual additions. In his latest, A Year in the Life of the Country, he uses similar found-footage methods to revisit the period of martial law imposed by the Polish military junta between December 1981 and July 1983.
Freewheeling and impressionistic, A Year in the Life of the Country is not a definitive account of this national trauma, a period already well covered in dramatised films and documentaries. But it is a lively, snappily edited mix-tape affair that serves as both history lesson for viewers too young to remember these events first hand (including Wolski himself) and a dark mirror on current geopolitical turbulence in Eastern Europe. As such, it should have broader audience appeal than a more formal, scholarly work might have. World premiered at Krakow Film Festival, where it won the Silver Horn prize, it screens at Dok Leipzig later this week,
The imposition of martial law was a major trauma for Poland and, in retrospect, an early warning sign that Communist Russia’s grip on its central European satellites was weakening. Panicked by deepening social and economic unrest, mass strikes and the growing power of independent trade union Solidarity, this nationwide crackdown by Poland’s military junta initially pacified the population. But not for long. In 1983, Solidarity co-founder Lech Walesa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while serving a jail term on trumped-up charges. Less that a decade later, the Soviet Union imploded and Walesa became Poland’s first democratically elected president.
Inevitably, Walesa is a major presence in Wolski’s freewheeling patchwork film, his whiskery grin popping up in numerous clips of his impromptu news conferences, his police interrogations, his spell behind bars and his release to a rock star’s welcome. Another recurring figure is former Polish authoritarian ruler General Wojciech Jaruzelski, notably his declaration of martial law on state television in December 1981, when he warned that Poland was “on the edge of the abyss”. This clip includes backstage studio glitches and fluffed lines, previously unseen cracks in Jaruzelski’s implacably stern public facade.
But Wolski’s favoured method is to “run away” from well-documented facts to find the smaller, idiosyncratic, often comically absurd human stories behind the headlines. Thus between footage of striking steelworkers, military patrols and granite-faced Party officials we see random street-life scenes, bare-shelved shops selling baby chicks in place of shoes, a British news reporter stumbling over his lines, and other quirky vignettes. Mostly we glimpse ordinary citizens, students, fresh-faced army recruits, workers and housewives complaining on camera about a range of related topics, from serious to trivial, from censorship and food shortages to inconvenient TV scheduling.
Cross-cutting fluidly between colour and monochrome, professional newsreel and amateur video, Wolksi edits A Year in the Life of the Country together with an elastic, jumpy rhythm that he likens to free jazz, a comparison reinforced by Jerzy Rogiewicz’s percussive, kinetic score, That said, this is one of the director’s more formally conventional films, its observational mosaic of vintage footage presented without editorial commentary or firm narrative shape. Only the post-production audio track, added to lend an extra layer of eyewitness immediacy, are a subtle but effective piece of embroidery. This technique has echoes of Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitza, for whom Wolski has worked in as editor. Indeed, Loznitsa is acknowledged in the credits here.
Wolski’s zippy, scattershot, time-jumping approach is one element that makes A Year in the Life of the Country feel fresh and engaging rather than a dusty museum piece. At a crisp, densely packed 85 minutes, there is simply no time for viewers to get bored. Another key hook factor are the timely contemporary echoes in an era when Russian imperialism has returned with a vengeance in Ukraine, Georgia and beyond.
The film shifts gear in its sombre closing section, an extended montage of public protests across Poland and the routinely violent police backlash against them. These images strike a universal chord: they could be Prague or Chicago in the late 1960s, Belfast in the 1970s, Syria or Iran today. But the most obvious modern parallels are with Putin’s resurgent Russian empire: a militarised realm of censorship, tyranny, state propaganda and brutal repression of opposition voices. “Nobody could have guessed this regime would return,” Wolski said recently, “this time wearing a different mask.” A Year in the Life of the Country is an ancient story that feels disturbingly modern in places.
Director, screenwriter, editing: Tomasz Wolski
Music: Jerzy Rogiewicz
Producer: Anna Gawlita
Production company: Kijora Film, Poland
World sales: So Films, Poland
Venue: Dok Leipzig festival (Panorama: Central and Eastern Europe)
In Polish
85 minutes
