Do Poznania Conversations in Poland1991

Personal glimpses of Polish life immediately preceding glasnost. Filmed during my two month-long visits (1986, 1988) as American Literature and Culture Specialist at Adam Mickiewicz University, it offers everyday street scenes, crumbling building facades, remains of death camps Auschwitz and Birkenau, Solidarity monument at Gdansk's Lenin Shipyard and traveling shots of idyllic countryside, all in a handheld camera style: personal, raw, rapid, eccentric, intense – the opposite of Lowell Thomas or PBS. Charging the rapidly fleeting images are gists of conversations with Poles in which I took part, re-created back in US – health and financial problems, queuing, environmental issues, Chernobyl, food, communists, anti-Semitism, "free" education and work under Soviet socialism. The "voices" I re-present are urgent and multiple, and enrich the images with ambiguity, contradiction and personal history. This film (pronounced "Doe Pohznawnia") is an unpretentious, unconventional, unimposing and uncompromising record of life in the last (and in some ways, worst) days of a regime whose loss of power was just around the corner.