Filmmaker Agnieszka Juszczak follows in the footsteps of the major Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow in order to understand how her lived experience - marked by war, exile and illness - shaped her work. Arriving in Paris in November 1947, she developed her sculpture through her encounter with the artistic spirit of the capital, where she met César, and then through her numerous back-and-forth journeys between Poland and France until 1963.
Gradually, her experience of the ghettos and camps emerges in the background of her work: Pabianice, Łódź and Bergen-Belsen, where she stayed for about ten months. By exhuming fragments of her past, Juszczak's film weaves a fantasized dialogue during this intimate inquiry between two eras, two countries, and two Polish women who emigrated to France.
In the presence of the filmmaker.
In conversation with Karolina Szymaniak, senior lecturer in Central European studies at Sorbonne Université.