The Thousand-Year Plan

Agnieszka Polska’s two parallel narratives unfold on two screens facing each other. The narratives are linked by the place and time of events, and by their structure, with repeated takes and animation superimposed on the film layer. In both films, we hear the same dialogues and sung parts. The protagonists, however, their dilemmas and expectations are different. In both films, they meet, accidentally, in a forest. Two of them may have known each other before; one of the men says the woman’s name, Victoria. Its symbolism defines the weight of the meeting.
 
The narratives are set in the early 1950s, in the vicinity of a fictitious village of Stasiny. On one of the screens, we watch a pair of engineers responsible for connecting the village to the electrical grid, on the other, two guerrillas hiding in the nearby forests. The first two are guided by hope and the sense of a mission; they force their way through, only to see the unfeasibility of the top-down project for laying the cables. In the People’s Republic of Poland, the countywide electrification programme was the authorities’ chief project, sanctioned by an a governmental decree passed in 1950. The fact that the state administration structures included the Ministry of Energy indicates the rank of that venture. The guerrillas, in turn, stand in opposition to the authorities; they live in hiding and survive by small-scale robbery. Both pairs move under the twin shadows of the war and the modernisation processes. The first two are afraid that the war might return; the other two are hoping it would. The engineers perceive electrification as a chance to eliminate fear; the guerrillas are planning to seize grid junctions. While they come from the same generation, they had reacted to the post-war realities in differing manners. They are linked by the experience of living in a breakthrough period and being a part of an unfolding history. The line: “Current is the measure of new times” is symptomatic.
 
Key to the narratives are the views of idyllic nature and dystopian images of the metropolis and interstellar space. In some shots, will-o’-the-wisps glimmer over men and animals; flashes of light vibrate, electrical discharges surround the protagonist’s faces. Polska’s films debunk the magic of remote-controlled processes of industrialisation, but also prompt reflection regarding the human race’s presence in the world. The engineers’ pride in harnessing electricity is combined with the contemplation of nature’s inner energy. Admiration for modernization processes brings to mind debates concerning renewable energy sources. In observing the past, Polska comments on the present; she reappraises the processes defining our “today”.