The theme of this year conference at Film O’Clock International Festival is “The Role of Archives and Cinema in Collective Healing.” In your experience, can archival-based cinema offer not just remembrance, but a kind of transformation for the viewer or the filmmaker alike?

In psychotherapy, we often work on narratives. We learn how to reformulate narratives that we have assimilated at different stages of our lives and which, for various reasons, have proven to be inadequate and sometimes – have caused us suffering. To do this, we often break down the narrative into individual events. And suddenly it turns out that these events do not necessarily have the same meaning as in our narrative, that they can evoke completely different emotions. In the next step, we try to put them back together in a more flexible way. We create a new narrative out of them, a new story about ourselves.

The same thing happens when I work with archives. I extract shots, images, sounds from the narrative in which they were embedded – and suddenly they turn out to be something else, more ambiguous, less defined. The work of a found footage artist and a psychotherapist or psychoanalyst are not so far apart.

Polish cinema has long wrestled with history, trauma, and identity. From your perspective as both a filmmaker and teacher, where do you see the notion of solidarity appearing in contemporary Polish film?

 Unfortunately, I have the impression that contemporary Polish cinema hardly ever talks about community or solidarity. This is disappointing in a country where solidarity was not just a word, but a powerful social movement involving around 10 million people. I don’t know if we have always been a society of individualists or if we became that way after the political transformation and the crash course in capitalism in the 1990s.

 This can be seen in our films – they are often stories that seem to lack a social, political or simply collective context. Almost every politician, from right to left, refers to the legacy of “Solidarity”, which makes it unclear what it actually is. Perhaps this is the task of cinema – to propose a new, collective myth. Or to show the old one in a way that makes it inspiring for us again.

In your work, especially in „Solaris Mon Amour”, there’s a strong sense of mourning, tenderness, and poetic tension. Do you see this emotional language as a form of cinematic expression to connect across generations, ideologies, or personal histories?

When we were working on “Solaris Mon Amour”, we asked ourselves: will anyone want to see this movie? Are we making it just for ourselves? Fortunately, the film was made in very comfortable conditions and was financed by a research grant, which allowed us to take the risk.

And I remember how relieved I felt when “Solaris Mon Amour” was shown to the audience and it turned out that it worked. That somehow we managed to share our emotions, which are elusive even to us. Every conversation after the screening of “Solaris Mon Amour” is different, depending on the audience and the context of the screening. I think we managed to find a difficult balance between the story we wanted to tell and the empty space that the audience can fill with their own emotions and associations.

Your film “Solaris Mon Amour” is built entirely from archival footage and radio recordings. How did working with these materials shape your reflection on personal and collective memory and how do you see the role of archives in emotional or historical healing?

“Solaris My Love” has a very personal meaning for me. Jagoda Murczyńska, a film critic, expert on Asian cinema and my partner for 20 years, died suddenly while I was working on the film. The movie is dedicated to her.

 At first, I wanted the film to be more about collective trauma – about how Stanisław Lem, the author of the novel “Solaris”, encoded his wartime experiences in the margins of his science fiction stories. But after Jagoda passed away, this film became something much more to me – a way to talk about my own emotions in a way that is doubly or triply mediated by Lem’s book, the conventions of science fiction and the archive of Educational Film Studio in Lodz.

 There is a scene in the movie where an astronaut picks something up from the surface of the planet with a thick rubber glove. It was something similar. Lem’s “Solaris” and “Solaris Mon Amour” became for me what in psychoanalysis is called a container – an external form that allows you to express the most difficult emotions, like a box for pain.

In your role as a lecturer at the Łódź Film School, how does this influence your educational approach and what do you consider most important when guiding young filmmakers today?

First of all, I try to help them recognize the specifics of their own creative process. What they need to be creative and what hinders them. For some, it will be strong emotions, for others, comfort, focus, and silence. I believe they should leave film school with this knowledge. So that they know how to take care of the process, how to enjoy it, so that they don’t burn out too early. Making films is a long-distance run. You have to know when to speed up and when to save your energy.

What do you find most compelling about the concept behind the Film O’Clock International Festival?

The idea of a festival that makes viewers watch and talk about films at the same time in different places around the world is something very exciting and moving. We need new rituals; we need new communities. And cinema has always been a community for me. I take the idea that a movie is a conversation with the audience very seriously. I really like meeting the audience after my films have been shown and consider it part of the whole process. Making films is a great privilege. I am very happy and grateful that “Solaris Mon Amour” can be part of this year’s Film O’Clock.