There is an ample tradition of historical dramas set in Interwar Poland, but there’s rarely one made by a woman director. Anna Jadowska wants to fill in this gap with her new project, “Tethys Ocean,” which will be presented at Thessaloniki Film Festival’s Agora Crossroads Co-production Forum next week.
The story unfolds in 1938, as seven-year-old Wiktoria is being sent from a village near Kraków to become a servant at the mansion of a wealthy family where her older cousin also works. Being a sleepwalker who can also see ghosts, the little girl has extraordinary sensitivity. Perhaps she even feels the near future tightening its grasp around Europe too. The script spans across four different seasons in the manor, as a sense of inevitable dread spreads through Wiktoria, the most open and sensitive person there.
“Tethys Ocean” marks Jadowska’s seventh directorial credit, among them the Netflix anthology “Erotica 2022,” and her most recent film, the Tribeca-awarded “Woman on the Roof.” The new film will be a second collaboration between Jadowska and Maria Blicharska-Lacroix of Blick Productions (France) and Donten & Lacroix Films (Poland), who recently co-produced Agnieszka Holland’s Venice award-winner “Green Border.” “Tethys Ocean” has also received development support from the Polish Film Institute.
The Polish director never hesitates to switch perspectives from one film to the next. Between “Woman on the Roof” and its elderly female protagonist to little Wiktoria in her newest project, Jadowska explores the whole spectrum of womanhood. “She may seem like a regular seven-year-old girl, but she’s quite special. She sees ghosts, she sleepwalks. It was surprisingly easy for me to rediscover my inner child while writing the script.”
Recently, there has been an upsurge in fiction and nonfiction books about the life of servants in this period in Polish history, and from a female perspective. “It’s something between a strictly historical and a very personal perspective,” Jadowska adds, citing as an example author Joanna Kuciel’s book “Servants of Everything.” But the director prefers micro-histories to macro narratives, so she places the important events “around the main story.” She explains that her approach was to “focus on the very small situation with this main character, but also realize that, on the subconscious level, she feels all the tensions around her, like all children do.”
Perhaps the past and the present are more interlinked than one suspects. “As someone raised on films about World War II, I found their view of the period to be very much black and white. Then, as a female director, I feel the responsibility to show a different perspective on such a quite well-known subject.” Through the eyes of a seven-year-old girl, the contemporary world and that of the Interwar period seem different, but not entirely dissimilar. “In Poland, the society was harshly divided; there were really poor people living almost like slaves. And it was really hard for them, as for example, for my grandmother, to imagine that she will live a different life one day.”
Jadowska sees this master-slave dichotomy as something inherent to us as humans. She adds that this systematic oppression runs deep, even if it’s not visible on the surface. “On a subconscious level, even though we are trying to be better and we like to think in a modern way about our society, still, it’s the base, it’s still like this black and white, divisive kind of thinking.”
When she spoke with PvNew, the director was doing location scouting near the place her grandmother, who inspired the script of “Tethys Ocean,” used to live. “I remember only a few of the stories that she told me, but I created a whole film around these small events,” she recounts.
Starting from seemingly unimportant, domestic situations, makes for an intimate introduction to the world of a child that’s also a servant to the rich. In light of that, it’s not surprising to learn that Jadowska’s character-building is an intuitive process. She summarizes it as having “a common base for all these characters. They are quite passive—in a good way!—but more importantly, they are very present, and organically believable, as human beings should be.”
Even if despotic structures still condition people’s thinking today, the Polish filmmaker sees a hope for a newly-built society only after we redefine hierarchical relationships. “We have to start at a very basic level,” she says, “and I believe the stories we tell ourselves, in films or novels, are very helpful in this process.”
Producer Blicharska-Lacroix expresses her confidence in Jadowska’s choices. “What is very important is that she always puts a female character at the center. In every film, it’s a different type of character. She works with what she’s passionate about and what she knows the most,” which makes her work “very truthful.”
The Agora Crossroads Co-production Forum takes place Nov. 5 – 9 in Thessaloniki, Greece.
