Grandmamauntsistercat

Director: Zuza Banasińska
Script: Zuza Banasińska
Editing: Zuza Banasińska

Poland 2024
22′ 30”

Film created from archival materials of the Educational Film Studio in Łódź, tells the story of a matriarchal family through the eyes of a child grappling with the reproduction of ideological and representational systems. Originally created as didactic and propagandist tools in communist Poland, the footage is repurposed as a locus of auto-fictional memories, with their scientific register shifted towards a treatment of images themselves as specimens.

The classic Slavic witch figure, Baba Jaga, is reimagined as a ‘prehistoric goddess from the times of the matriarchy’. This transformation incites layered reflections on kinship and identity, as the child navigates binary gender roles. The women in the family find home within the archive, engaging in a process of self- and world-making, overturning the often sexist and anthropocentric images into tools of freedom and resistance.