Robert Gliński does not shy away from difficult topics. He started his journey as a director of documentaries, but as he emphasized himself: “It takes an awful lot of patience, humbleness, waiting for what would be unique and true to life. When I was young, I always wanted to bend the reality.” However, Gliński can hardly be described as devoid of patience or an uncompromising attitude. His ambitious debut Sunday Pranks produced in 1983 by the Karol Irzykowski Film Studio definitely had those qualities. In this black-and-white drama inspired by the play Juegos a la hora de la siesta by Roma Mahieu, Gliński addressed the issues of Stalinism in a way that was subtle and inconspicuous but yet piercing. The murderous system is reflected in the micro-universe of a backyard in Warsaw where we can see children playing a day after Stalin’s death. A communist mindset cuts through the backyard’s hierarchy, and even through the play, which looks quite innocent at first glance.

Sunday Pranks waited on the shelf for five years. During that time, Poisonous Plants came out, a film about the Polish Thaw after October 1956, followed three years later by Swan Song, which won the Silver Lions in Gdynia for directing. The dilemmas of the protagonist of this film-about-film comedy, a screenwriter who cannot decide which film genre would suit his narrative best: a musical or a drama, seem to resonate with Gliński himself as he boldly tries different styles. As he says about himself: “I’m changing, times are changing, themes are changing. My temperament makes me attracted to many diverse things. I’m thinking about a musical film while still working on a psychological drama. For contrast.” Therefore, Gliński’s filmography includes science-fiction (Supervision of 1990, which depicts a dystopian society controlled by security forces through TV screens), comedies (e.g. Love Me and Do Whatever You Want of 1997) and psychological dramas (e.g. Mother of Her Own Mother of 1996).

Nonetheless, Gliński returned, and with great success, to telling realistic stories of individuals caught up in historical dependencies. As early as in 1992 his All What Really Matters based on the memories of Ola Watowa, who was relocated with her child to a sovkhoz in the steppe of Kazakhstan, was recognized at Gdynia Polish Film Festival and won a few awards, including the Golden Lions. His drama Hi, Tereska (2001), which is a portrait of an introvertive, lonely teenage girl from a tower block estate in Warsaw, a place cast outside the official optimistic narrative about the post-transformation Poland, became even more critically acclaimed. Uncompromising and rough-style, with non-professionals cast in the leading roles, this film is undoubtedly one of the best of Gliński’s works and has been showered with awards (including the Golden Lions, the Journalists Award and the Audience Award at Gdynia Polish Film Festival, the Eagle Polish Film Awards for best director, best screenplay and best actor for Zbigniew Zamachowski and Polityka’s Passport).

The theme of individuals entangled in the historical events recurs for Gliński in his film adaptation of Stones For the Rampart (2014) and in The Call of the Toad (2005) based on the literary work of Günter Grass, which presents an ironic portrayal of the Polish and German relations. That amphibian’s croak seems to be an apt metaphor of the sneering laugh of History that plagues many of the characters who appear in Gliński’s films.

Katarzyna Szarla