Gusła ou les Malins
2016 · 8m · Francia
Directed by Adrienne Nowak
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, surreal
Adrienne returns with her grandmother to her native Poland to ask her family about communism. In the privacy of her uncle and aunt's kitchen, she discovers that communist ghosts are not the only ones haunting the Polish imagination, and that there are many unexpected, ancestral ways of dealing with them.
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It's a family interview that refuses to stay documentary—the surrealism sneaks in like an uninvited guest, and suddenly you're not sure if the ghosts are metaphorical or just what happens when you ask the wrong questions in a Polish kitchen. Most people would've made this straight confession; Nowak knows better.
Nowak situates herself in the essay film tradition—intimate, essayistic, formally aware—where the personal inquiry becomes a gateway to the collective and the ancestral; the move from historical interrogation into surreal territory feels earned, positioned within a lineage of films that treat the domestic space as archive.
The decisive move is audio: the way Nowak lets ambient kitchen sound—the weight of silence, the small domestic noises—do the haunting work that images alone couldn't carry, transforming a modest family conversation into something uncanny with almost no resources except listening.