Barbara Sass – Women Without Complexes

These films are also united by the presence of actress Dorota Stalińska, whose powerful personality and expressive performances fill the screen, drawing viewers into the inner worlds of her characters. Together, the director and actress formed an exceptionally creative artistic partnership, resulting in such a timeless work as Scream. It is no coincidence that the film was included on the Polish Film Heritage List compiled by the National Film Archive.

We invited Barbara Sass to the first International Women’s Cinema Showcase in Poland, organized by DKF Hybrydy at Kino Kultura in 1986. At the twilight of the somber era of the People’s Republic of Poland, it was an event driven by enthusiasm, opening a window onto the wider world. Following the screening of Scream, Barbara Sass and Dorota Stalińska engaged in a long discussion with the audience. The film’s distinctly female energy was met with great acclaim. In the recorded discussion, however, the director distances herself from the label of “women’s cinema”. She remarks that women in the West protest because they feel discriminated against, whereas in Poland, she claims, such complexes do not exist – we feel equal. On the one hand, Sass dismisses what she calls “completely contrived problems” of discrimination; on the other, she recounts her own experience of the deliberate policies at the Łódź Film School, where directing professor Antoni Bohdziewicz “could not stand women and would not admit them”. Sass openly admits that she was accepted only due to a fortunate coincidence – the professor happened to be absent at the time of admissions. Upon his return, he “set about that year and gradually began to eliminate those girls”, of whom she was the sole survivor.

As Maria Kornatowska observed, Barbara Sass was “torn between the ambitious desire to address the ‘woman question’ and the male intellectual stereotypes from which she was unable to fully free herself”. Although she did not believe that women perceive the world in a fundamentally different way from men, in her films it is exclusively women who speak, scream, see, and act. It is as if her films remained true to the reality she experienced, while her off-screen statements were not always capable of expressing it. The contradictions of that era were later articulated by the director herself in a 2012 interview with Monika Talarczyk: “Emancipation under communism was internally contradictory – nothing made sense, as propaganda said one thing, while life was governed by entirely different rules”.

Barbara Sass can – and unquestionably should – be recognized as a pioneer of women’s cinema in Poland. She emerged as a courageous filmmaker who consistently portrayed the world through women’s eyes, doing so in a way that was both universal and formally accomplished, marked by a distinctive cinematic language and enduring relevance. Today, she has numerous successors both in Poland and internationally, and more and more films by women are being inscribed into the canon of film heritage.

Dorota Roszkowska, Barbara Młynarz Pomorska

The festival is co-financed by the City of Warsaw, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, and the Polish Film Institute.

The festival’s main partners are the National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute (FINA), the Gutek Film, and the New Horizons Association.

The festival is co-organized by the Documentary and Feature Film Studios (WFDiF) and the Mazovia Institute of Culture.