Birth Certificate

A Wehrmacht soldier hands a Polish boy a Lindt chocolate. Then, he gets back on the motorcycle and rides off into the distance. With this sequence, Stanisław Różewicz begins his film, written together with his brother Tadeusz. It is clear that there will be no simple diagnoses or convenient distinctions between good and evil – rather, WWII will be portrayed in shades of moral greys and shown through the prism of everyday life of children for whom the titular “birth certificate” is a curse or a luxury good. The film takes a different approach to Jerzy Kosiński’s The Painted Bird, relying on understatement and the power of poetic metaphor. The desolate landscapes of the Polish countryside and cities destroyed by air strikes act as a bleak but evocative backdrop for reflections on the cruelty of the adult world and the horror of war, which – to paraphrase the title of the reportage by the Belarusian Nobel Prize winner – is definitely unchildlike.

Joanna Najbor