Synopsis
Film created from archival materials of the Educational Film Studio in Łódź, tells the story of a matriarchal family through the eyes of a child grappling with the reproduction of ideological and representational systems. Originally created as didactic and propagandist tools in communist Poland, the footage is repurposed as a locus of auto-fictional memories, with their scientific register shifted towards a treatment of images themselves as specimens.
The classic Slavic witch figure, Baba Jaga, is reimagined as a 'prehistoric goddess from the times of the matriarchy'. This transformation incites layered reflections on kinship and identity, as the child navigates binary gender roles. The women in the family find home within the archive, engaging in a process of self- and world-making, overturning the often sexist and anthropocentric images into tools of freedom and resistance.
Statement of the director
The origins of my film lie in an exploratory process within the Essay Film Studio at the vnLab, adjacent to the Polish Film School. This context granted me access to over 300 films from the archive of the Educational Film Studio in Łódź. This institution, during communist Poland, created educational films covering a vast array of topics—from anatomy and brain function to urban pollution, nuclear survival guides, children’s stories, and even instructional videos on women’s appearance.
Immersing myself in this footage over months, I experienced it as simultaneously charged with didactic institutional violence and haunted by dreams of unrealized futures. The archival material seemed to speak from a fractured temporal and spatial perspective, one that I felt deeply while working in the Netherlands, far from the Polish contexts these films emerged from. Perhaps it was this longing for home that shaped my evolving relationship to the footage—a connection of kinship rather than mere critical detachment. This shift, from a disembodied and didactic gaze to one of closeness, became the foundational framework for the film.
The archive’s focus on children and its educational mandate led me to center the figure of the child in my narrative. Children in this context are fascinating: they embody a complex duality, being simultaneously seen as pure and as the primary site for the normative sociocultural construction of identity. This is especially evident in films like I compose, you compose, he composes (dir. Grażyna Kędzielawska, 1976), which features a child guiding viewers through meaning-making exercises. The film’s playful construction of worlds by a child contrasted sharply with its reproduction of normative values, particularly in scenes where children imitated stereotypical adult roles. This tension informed my choice of a child as narrator, allowing me to explore the interplay between representation and abstraction, between what images represent and what they suggest as shapes, surfaces, and forms.
The inclusion of Baba Yaga as a central figure deepened this exploration. Baba Yaga, for me, represents a “double agent” who embodies both oppression and resistance. Like the distortions in the film that signal the family’s rejection of patriarchal norms while simultaneously revealing their embeddedness, Baba Yaga exists in tension between pre-defined identities and the capacity for self-definition. I was drawn to her hybridity, as seen in classic tales where she rides a mortar, conceals her traces with a broom, and lives in a hut perched on a chicken foot. These images speak to her layered history, shaped by diverse influences. Even the term “baba,” now a derisive word for “woman” in Slavic languages, originates from the Indo-European root bab, which has associations with “grandmother,” “father,” “sister,” and “child.” Its simplicity and primal sound—something a child can easily utter—evoke a sense of kinship.
Several archeological researchers linking Baba Yaga to the remnants of the Great Mother cult of matriarchal societies, also informed my approach. These societies possibly transitioned to patriarchy with the introduction of land ownership during the Neolithic Revolution. This idea resonated with my own childhood, marked by a daily oscillation between the seemingly sealed matriarchal world of my home and the patriarchal reality outside. Yet, rather than privileging one system over the other, I sought to complicate this binary. Baba Yaga, as a hybrid figure, embodies the coexistence of these two orders, representing a “muddied” authority that transcends simplistic categorization.
The selection of archive images was an organic and iterative process. I experimented with combining footage and sounds—found, recorded or composed—to observe how the material might transform and reveal its latent narratives. My filmmaking approach prioritizes spatiality over linearity; I focused on creating environments where images and sounds interact dynamically rather than illustrating a predetermined story. This approach was particularly well-suited to subverting the original representational intent of the footage. I sought to “queer” these normative images through the child’s creative acts of world-building and identity exploration.
The child figure also allowed me to investigate personal themes, such as my own non-binarity. Rather than introducing queerness as a direct narrative, I engaged it as an action: a way to deconstruct, hybridize, and reimagine the normative images of the archive. By creating microcosms for each character in the film, I reframed the footage to resist the patriarchal, didactic lens through which it was originally produced. This resistance included minimizing the presence of men and foregrounding women, animals, and organisms—figures traditionally relegated to the margins or objectified and treated as specimens.
The title of the film reflects this thematic exploration of kinship and resistance. The archival footage often upholds a stark division between the all-knowing, disembodied male subject and the “Others”—women, animals, and organisms—reduced to bodies subjected to scrutiny. In response, I imagined these “Others” forming a hybrid organism, a strategy of resistance through connection. By focusing on kinship rather than detached objectivity, I sought to subvert the didactic violence of the footage and open new avenues for meaning. The title encapsulates this collective transformation, a reclaiming of agency through interrelation and the dissolution of rigid boundaries.
