21/07/2017

Animals and people

An orphanage deep in the Owl Mountains; children liberated from a concentration camp; a pack of feral dogs prowling the surrounding forests. It may sound like a horror movie in a historical disguise, but Wolf Mountain, formerly known as Werewolf, will blend genre cinema with psychological drama. Adrian Panek talks about his second feature film shortly before the shooting begins.

Jakub Demiańczuk: The previous title, Werewolf, sounds like a full-blooded horror, but the script indicates that your movie won’t be a scary tale.

Adrian Panek: The title might be a little misleading, though the movie will have elements of the horror and thriller genre – but it won’t be a pure horror and I wouldn’t want to advertise it as such. The current working title is Wolf Mountain – a literal translation of Wolfsberg, the German name of the Włodarz peak in the Owl Mountains, where the film takes place.

And the plot’s not typical horror fare either, it’s more of a Lord of the Flies retelling set in post-war Poland. 

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is still a powerful, original tale. These comparisons also came up when my project was being evaluated in the Polish Film Institute. We immediately associate children’s violence with that story, but I’m turning the concept upside down. Upper-class public school boys suddenly turn into savages in Lord of the Flies, guided by instincts previously repressed by their upbringing, civilization, and culture. My movie reverses the direction: children try to regain their humanity after being reduced to animals in concentration camps.

Is it even possible to talk about still-raw wartime and postwar wounds through the medium of genre movies?

I think the separation of genre and artistic cinema is coing to an end. Every good story has a conciseness and a set of rules putting the plot and content in order. The formula of genre film has the additional advantage of being a recognizable blueprint that’s accessible to the viewers. After all, Lord of the Flies blends several genres as well – it’s an adventure story that takes an unexpected turn. To some degree my blueprint is a mixture of thriller and monster-in-the-house horror; the interaction between children and dogs was modeled after that type of cinema.

The horror genre seems like the perfect metaphor for dealing with postwar fears. It’s odd that Polish literature and film basically never used it.

Over the last 70 years we’ve mostly talked about war in a very solemn tone, but there’s nothing stopping us from taking a different tack. The problem is, you can’t transplant genre cinema into Polish culture without some alterations. Every nation’s cinema has its own peculiarities. We have to blend the form of genre film – which is very alien to the slow Slavic narration – with the thing we’re good at: showing the clash between the individual and the forces of history. That’s not an easy feat, but Polish filmmakers are increasingly more successful in their forays into genre works. For example, Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s Lure, a film that won me over when it was just a script: a story about Communist Poland told in a weird style completely unlike anything else.

Or Marcin Wrona’s Demon, also a story about facing up to serious, unhealed trauma. 

The screenplay to Demon was written around the same time as my film’s.

Rumor has it your script was inspired to some degree by a true story. 

Some parts are indeed based on true events. Palaces abandoned by Germans were turned into orphanages. Even our location used to be an orphanage for a time, though it housed children of SS-men killed on the Eastern front, not concentration camp survivors. The story about dogs gone feral after their release from a liberated camp is true as well.

Your young protagonists arrive at the orphanage from the Gross-Rosen camp. Is this because the film is set in the Owl Mountains?

I’m from Wrocław, so this region had a powerful influence on my imagination and still stimulates it. I’m fascinated by this borderland between Poland, Germany, and Czechia. After the war this region was a no man’s land, still marked by a different civilization, but purged of its native inhabitants. Its presence was widely reflected in Polish cinema, for example in The Law and the Fist. So the choice of our shooting location – the palace where the events are taking place – is deliberate. But we decided to go with Gross-Rosen because it was closest and functioned as a transit camp for a time. That was where they put prisoners pulled back from camps further East, including Auschwitz, during the Red Army’s advance. I wasn’t thinking about a specific camp while writing the script – I was focused on Lower Silesia as a place of cultural transformation and passage of civilizations.

Gross-Rosen, much like many other palaces in the region, was taken over by the NKVD after the war. German documentation was largely lost. Did this complicate your work on the script?

Documentation was being systematically destroyed in all camps, because Germans didn’t want to leave a record of their activities. While Gross-Rosen indeed became a NKVD prison, I don’t bring this up in my movie. I wanted to show this story through the experiences of its protagonists, through their psyche, their interpersonal conflicts. I wanted to let them say who they are and what they had survived.

It seems this movie will buck the current trends in Polish historical cinema. Instead of heroic feats you’re showing the consequences of war from the point of view of its most innocent victims: children and animals.

When Andrzej Wajda read my script, he said it should be titled Innocents. I wasn’t really into the purely historical perspective. While I was shooting Daas, a costume drama set in 18th century Poland, I didn’t find that whole aspect of national liberation particularly interesting. There are plenty of works dealing with these issues; there are plenty of other issues worth talking about. Besides, a film set in a different era should portray our times in historical disguise. Making Daas, I felt that the crisis of religion depicted in the movie was still present and very relevant. It seems that Wolf Mountain will have some parallels to the present times. I didn’t want to limit my story to ”children are war’s greatest victims” – while it’s true, it’s cinematically banal. I was more interested in the boundary between the human and the animal; what’s it like to be dehumanized, then try to regain your humanity? Thus the werewolf – a creature that crosses this boundary. It’s both animal and human.

Werewolves are also manifestations of wild, primal nature.

This too is reflected in the plot: humiliated and reduced to animals, the children manage to survive concentration camps. This dehumanized state also lets them deal with the circumstances they end up in after the war. What seemed like weakness might turn out to be strength at a key plot point.

The plot of Wolf Mountain is centered around the rivalry of two boys. How old are your protagonists?

Fourteen.

Was it hard to find young actors capable of handling this serious subject matter?

The search was long and took us to unusual places, like group homes. We found the right boys two years ago, when they were twelve, in line with the previous version of my script. However, delays kept mounting and we had to adapt the plot. Some of our boys appeared in other movies while waiting for Werewolf – Nicolas Przygoda starred in Playground and Jakub Syska in Filip Bajon’s Kamerdyner. If their careers are taking off, I think we made the right choice!

Two years might not seem like much, but it might matter for the plot. 12-year-olds would have treated the female protagonist, Hanka, as just a nanny, but older boys will see her as a woman. Did this have any bearing on the script?

Yes. Hanka is a maternal figure to our protagonists as well as their first object of romantic fascination. Of course this duality becomes more pronounced now.

Who else will appear in your film? It might be harder to promote a movie without any stars.

Actress Sonia Mietielica, a young graduate of the Warsaw Theatre Academy, will appear alongside the boys. Jadwiga, a traumatized woman supposed to take over their care, will be portrayed by Danuta Stenka, with whom I worked on Daas. Other characters will be played by actors from Germany, Russia, and Ukraine. Are they stars? Some have appeared alongside Tom Cruise and other American stars. But personally I hope the strength of this movie will lie not in its stars, but in the suspense and originality of the script.

You’ve been preparing for this film for several years now. How far along is it?

True, it took quite a bit of time. I started working on this project in 2013, then applied to the Polish Film Institute for financing, got a script grant, started accumulating development funds…  We managed to pull everything together in the end and the film will be a Polish-German-Dutch co-production. Shooting started on July 15th. We’re planning on 30 shooting days, then there’ll be post-production, sound editing in the Netherlands… We’re going to premiere next year. I’d like to make it in time for the Gdynia festival, but we don’t have a release date yet.

Interview by Jakub Demiańczuk (translated by Dariusz Kołaczkowski)