Sunday and the Collection – Anna Okrasko, Sobota/Zatertag/Saturday – film screening

Anna Okrasko, Sobota/Zatertag/Saturday, 2011

video, 20 min 30 sec

18 September 2016, Sunday,10.00 – 18.00

Arsenal Gallery, ul. A. Mickiewicza 2, Białystok

Free entry!

Work description:

The video screening Saturday was created in answer to the unfavourable image of Polish immigrants created by the Dutch press. Although she created an involved work, Anna Okrasko did not employ the vocabulary of social criticism. She decided to subvert harmful stereotypes by means of a poetic étude about Polish workers resident in Rotterdam. It is neither a fictitious portrait where a group would stand for the entire community, nor a record of a day in the life of a Pole in Holland. Becoming one of her own protagonists, Okrasko constructed the film from shots that make it possible to peek into the people’s private life. The resulting film is simply about residents of a city; only details, such as pierogi-making or the surnames “Załęski” and “Załęska” on the T-shirts, indicate that they belong to the Polish diaspora.

With the sensitivity of an anthropologist, Okrasko creates an image of a city and of people who absorb it and attempt to tame it. The film has no dialogue; it was replaced by expressive, almost illustrative music. The narrative, constructed like a patchwork in both its picture and sound layers, consists of shots recording outings into the city (including less serious events, like the bin-liner race) and everyday life at home. The heroes of Saturday celebrate a free day together, while at the same time infiltrate the tissue of the place of which they are a part (sometimes literally, as when they try to inscribe themselves into city sculptures). Okrasko herself describes Saturday as a “mobile human memorial moving in the public space of Rotterdam”, which she dedicates to foreigners living in this city.

Okrasko’s tale of melancholy and alienation, as well as friendship and sense of community, has been greatly influenced by the 1950s documentary films by Kazimierz Karabasz and Władysław Ślesicki. She has modelled not only her music or the convention of black-and-white image on The Musicians (1960) by Karabasz and People From an Empty Zone (1957) and A Day Without the Sun (1959) by Ślesicki and Karabasz. The kinship goes deeper: the music score sets the tension and narrative rhythm, the protagonists play themselves, and the situations in which they are captured are quotations from these classics of the Polish school of documentary filming. Okrasko’s work is not a documentary, however, but an acted film having features of a documentary, which thus has a significant potential to explode the deep-rooted framework of the stereotype.

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