“Night Herons”

Joanna Rajkowska and Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman combine biographical and historical threads into a story in which the private fates of their families intertwine with collective traumas. In Slavic beliefs, the Night Heron was the guide of dead souls. In Rajkowska and Sniderman’s work, it accompanies Jewish refugees hiding in the swamps. Dzidek, Rajkowska’s father, is still a boy in the first scenes of the film, who escaped with his mother from a transport carrying Warsaw Jews to Auschwitz. The subsequent sequences form a multigenerational narrative, returning to the landscape of swamps and wetlands. In one of its storylines,
the once-persecuted Dzidek appears as a hunter. The transformation from victim to perpetrator becomes a way of coping with
unresolved trauma—a mechanism that is painfully recognizable in the context of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In the final scene,
hybrid human-animal creatures perform a mysterious ritual to the sounds of the anathema once imposed on Spinoza by the Jewish
community. This ghostly echo of ancient beliefs reminds us of the recurring violence and attempts to work through inherited historical traumas across species.