The most interesting directorial duo of the Polish arthouse cinema. Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal's cinema is intriguingly distinct, surprising in its wealth of cinematic forms and literary tropes. Never obvious, it diagnoses and narrates what is happening around us in metaphorical form and camouflage.
Section programme
It captures everything important, irritating, suppressed and painful in contemporary Poland. It is the cinema of extreme topicality, which pulsates with political engagement and social sensitivity, yet without journalistic verbosity. Since their joint feature debut, It Looks Pretty From a Distance, Anka Sasnal and Wilhelm Sasnal have been present at the festival in Wrocław with all their subsequent films. The jubilee edition, which looks back at the history of New Horizons and sketches out visions of the future, is the perfect moment for a retrospective of the artists who created this history together with us.
During the festival, we will present five films made jointly by the duo:
- It Looks Pretty From a Distance (2011)
- Parasite (2013)
- The Sun, the Sun Blinded Me (2016)
- We Haven’t Lost Our Way (2022)
- The Assistant (2025)
The New Horizons festival will premiere their latest work, The Assistant. Apart from Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal, Wrocław will host their regular collaborators, actors and actresses: Agnieszka Podsiadlik, Joanna Drozda, Rafał Maćkowiak, Małgorzata Zawadzka, Andrzej Konopka, Agnieszka Żulewska, Piotr Trojan and Roman Garncarczyk, who will take part in meetings with the audience.
Tuesday, 22 July, will host a masterclass with Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal, talking about work on the five films shown during this year’s retrospective. The artists will select one scene from each movie and discuss the chosen cinematic tools and dramaturgical assumptions. Each scene will be a starting point for discussing their recurring filmographic themes – collective and individual memory, fear of strangers, socially engaged and engaging cinema. Viewers will also watch several never-before-seen materials from the Sasnal family film archive. The masterclass will be hosted by Kuba Mikurda.
On the evening of 22 July, at the Arsenal Festival Club, Wilhelm Sasnal will share his passion for music and show a selection of his short films – original music videos for his favourite songs, recordings of everyday life, short films shot on 8mm and 16mm film – accompanied by a soundtrack composed of songs featured in the films and a playlist of tracks that have special meaning for Wilhelm.
Read more about the cinema of Anka Sasnal and Wilhelm Sasnal in Kuba Mikurda's introduction.
The retrospective is curated by Ewa Szabłowska.
View from Afar, View from up Close
What if Polish cinema were more daring? What if it diagnosed the so-called present-day problems before journalists even had a chance to talk them down? What if it were more willing to reach for books outside the canon? What if it was experimenting with form and avoided traditional ‘novelistic’ storytelling?
Well, it is. Films of the directorial duo Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal.
The Sasnals' films record a unique process—observation, thinking, reading, reacting. Each subsequent film grows out of the previous one but also undermines and expands it, trying to do what the previous one failed to achieve. There is no other filmography in contemporary Polish cinema that is so organic, so restless and, in a sense, so ‘Polish’.
CAMERA
In the autobiographical comic book Everyday Life in Poland 1999-2001, Anka reproaches Wilhelm, saying, ‘Can't you be normal? Do you always have to film?’ When they started making movies together, someone asked him, ‘Which came first: the camera or Anka?’ ‘Anka,’ replied Wilhelm, ‘We had already known each other when I bought the 8 mm camera in 1997.’ Although he gained worldwide fame primarily as a painter, Wilhelm had always made short movies—original music videos for his favourite songs, recordings of everyday life, film collages. He did not tell stories, focusing on composition, dynamics and emotion. In a sense, ‘storytelling’ was the domain of Anka, a graduate of Polish literature, an editor at a publishing house, and an avid reader. They joined forces in 2011 – she wrote the script based on which they co-directed It Looks Pretty from a Distance, their first full-length feature film.
WORK
The uniqueness of the Sasnals' films stems from the fact that Anka and Wilhelm are not unanimous and do not divide their responsibilities rigidly. Although Wilhelm's element is the set, it is not that ‘Wilhelm is responsible for the images and Anka for the text’. ‘If someone needs to be shouted at, I do it, but I also act as Mother Mary intermediary, mediating between us and the crew, which also says a lot about our characters in private life,’ says Anka. Each of their films results from long and lively negotiations concerning every aspect of the work. ‘There's no point in hiding it, we often argue,’ says Anka. ‘Each of us looks for something different in art,’ says Wilhelm. In the case of The Sun, the Sun Blinded Me, she argued that the film should be a pretext for conversation and questions, whereas he insisted that art should be more direct, ‘like a hit over the head.’ While making We Haven’t Lost Our Way, Wilhelm condemned the escapism of the main characters, and Anka claimed that ‘making such a choice is sometimes necessary’ and ‘perhaps such people are the rebels of our time.’ When reading The Assistant, Wilhelm was in fits of laughter, while Anka found it not funny at all.
FREEDOM
Kuba Czekaj, assistant director of It Looks Pretty from a Distance, was delighted to find the set different from a typical production, where tasks are assigned in advance and deadlines are scrupulously followed. When Wilhelm saw something intriguing, he simply filmed it. The couple realise that making films their way is a great privilege. That was the case of The Assistant, which Wilhelm commented, ‘it was financed by a gallery that trusts me, so I didn't have to compromise at all.’ But creative freedom also means being able to say ‘this isn't it’—and to shelve the film. This happened with the post-apocalyptic Fallout made in 2010 at the Nitrogen Plant in Tarnów-Mościce. ‘For me, making a film for twenty or thirty million in a country like Poland is immoral,’ says Wilhelm. ‘What should a director do when he’s not satisfied with what he’s made?”
LITERATURE
‘I am addicted to reading, and so is Wili,’ says Anka Sasnal. Wilhelm adds, ‘A book is primarily a tool that allows escape from perceptual-mental patterns.’Three of the films that make up this year's retrospective are original adaptations of novels—The Stranger by Albert Camus (The Sun, the Sun Blinded Me), To Warmer Countries by J. C. Jersild (We Haven’t Lost Our Way) and The Assistant by Robert Walser. However, Anka emphasises that their version of ‘adaptation’ does not mean ‘conformity of the film image with the reader's ideas’, but something much more autonomous. The Stranger has followed Anka since primary school, when her father accidentally bought her Camus' book instead of the book by Irena Jurgielewiczowa of a similar title. Wilhelm bought To Warmer Countries because of its attractive cover. It Looks Pretty from a Distance comes from, among other things, Barbara Engelking's book Such a Beautiful Sunny Day, about which Anka said, ‘Never before or since have I experienced reading so physically. It was like a medical condition.’
THE PAST
There is a scene in It Looks Pretty from a Distance which always makes an impression on me. A cottage. The Polish one. Like the ones in Falski's primer. Or the ones children draw. Two windows, a sloping roof, a fence. A woman stands in the window. And she howls rhythmically, like a machine or a siren. Like Terminus, the robot from Lem's story, who rhythmically bangs on a pipe, transmitting in Morse code the screams and cries for help of the crew who died many years earlier in a space disaster.
AAA. AAA. AAA. Like the first letter of the alphabet. Like an alarm.
The woman from It Looks Pretty is also a transmitter. Or rather, a medium. She calls from the past. From the depths of the earth, the ‘bloodlands’, as Timothy Snyder called Central and Eastern Europe. But how to respond to this voice? How to live in a ‘haunted little house’? In the Sasnals’ films, the past regularly overlaps with the present, permeates and infects it. There is something anachronistic about them—not in the sense of ‘expiration’ or ‘expiry date’, but precisely as a tear between different times. This is most evident in It Looks Pretty, in which contemporary characters unknowingly reenact wartime looting. It is also obvious in The Sun, where a situation from a 1942 text is repeated in a contemporary Poland. Or in The Assistant, which takes place—well, when? At the beginning of the 20th century? In the 1970s? Today?
DISAGREEMENT
When asked why they made Sun, the Sun Blinded Me, which transfers the main plot from The Stranger to contemporary Poland, they reply—‘out of disagreement’. ‘The film about a Pole who, while running along the seashore, meets a dark-skinned man washed up by the waves, was made when our language was changing and the right wing was giving words different meanings. (...) We simply disagree with this language and this way of thinking, with stuffiness,’ said Anka. But It Looks Pretty from a Distance also grows out of disagreement with oblivion, which results in repeating the same behaviours in successive generations; or Parasite—disagreement with the idealised, unreflectively reproduced image of motherhood.
Both admit that they ‘suffer from Poland’—that even though so many ‘Polish issues’ arouse their opposition, even though they are still struggling and stumbling with Poland, they cannot leave. They are ingrained in Polish history, landscape and language. ‘The image of the outsider artist makes me laugh, I feel a full-fledged citizen,’ says Wilhelm. Each of their films is ‘cinema that interferes’—in the discussion about the books by Jan Tomasz Gross and Barbara Engelking on the attitudes of Poles towards the Holocaust (It Looks Pretty), the migration crisis and its political and existential consequences (The Sun), the decline of the intelligentsia as a social formation (We Haven’t Lost Our Way), and the contemporary precariat (The Assistant).
That is how the Sasnals' cinema—initially rejected by the film industry as ‘semi-amateur’ or ‘gallery’—is deeply ‘clawed’ into contemporary Poland (‘clung with its claws,’ as Anka would say); a cinema in permanent conflict with extra-cinematic reality. These are the engaged films—insofar as ‘engaged’ means not indifferent and alert; and engaging—insofar as ‘engaging’ means provoking conversation and taking a stand. They are the films about the toxins that paralyse the community—unresolved generational trauma, fear and helplessness.
Kuba Mikurda
Radio TOK FM is the partner of the retrospective.
