Ola Jankowska

She was born in Gdańsk in 1989. She was admitted to the Łódź Film School immediately after graduating from high school, at the age of eighteen. Three years later, she began parallel studies at the National Film and Television School in London. At both institutions, she directed short fiction and documentary films, including Strawberry Fields, a fiction film about two twelve-year-old girls who embark on a risky game together, and Wind Catchers, a dreamlike documentary “postcard” from an abandoned town in north-western Poland.

Jankowska honed her directing craft on professional film sets, working as an assistant director. Among others, she collaborated with Tomasz Śliwiński on the thirty-minute fiction film Ondine, starring Bartosz Bielenia in the leading role. She is currently assisting on the latest film by Carlos Reygadas, whose production is scheduled to begin at the end of 2023. In 2022, she completed her doctoral degree at the Łódź Film School. For many years, she has also taught creative writing to screenwriting students at the school.

In 2019, the feature-length documentary I Was Here, which Jankowska co-directed with Nathalie Biancheri, premiered at the CPH:DOX festival in Copenhagen. In the film, the directors observe participants auditioning to become the subject of a documentary. The candidates—residents of British villages and small towns—speak to the camera about their lives, searching through their memories for something they believe might be worth preserving. The film raises questions about what truly constitutes an interesting life and where the human desire to leave something behind for future generations comes from.

At the same time, through the TorinoFilmLab Script&Pitch programme and the Ekran+ programme at the Wajda School, Jankowska was developing the screenplay for Anatomy, her first feature-length fiction film.

By the time she joined the Wajda School, the director already had a completed screenplay. She admits that at this stage of development, what mattered most to her was the opportunity to test the film’s form and discover what cinematic language this particular story required.

The protagonist of Anatomy is Mika. After many years away, the young woman returns to Warsaw to visit her father, who has been hospitalized following the recurrence of an old brain injury and is suffering from memory loss. At first, Mika is observed from a distance—not only physically but psychologically as well. The camera depicting the events of her present-day life does not follow the characters closely, nor does it move in to extract emotions from every detail. On the contrary, it most often remains still. It is up to the viewer to decide which details to notice within the carefully constructed static compositions and which elements to regard as significant. More dynamic camerawork and close-ups appear only in the sequences shot on VHS, depicting Mika’s childhood, and later in the film.

With her debut feature, Jankowska reminds us how much cinema still has to offer, how uniquely suited it is to constructing stories that are indirect, non-linear, and more concerned with searching than with providing answers.

The protagonist, played brilliantly by Karolina Kominek, is restrained and does not immediately reveal her emotions. It is as if an invisible pane of glass separates her from events and from reality itself. The cinematography by Małgorzata Szyłak, depicting a grey, concrete-and-glass Warsaw city centre filled with strange corners, visual symmetries, and mirror reflections, eloquently underscores Mika’s emotional state. The film focuses primarily on Śródmieście and Wola—districts of Warsaw where the past collides with the present in surprising and at times strikingly literal ways. Despite all the transformations it has undergone over the years, the fabric of the city remains remarkably resilient and malleable. Something similar happens to Mika. Returning to her hometown and meeting a father who seems convinced that time has stood still, who believes his daughter is still a teenager visiting him after school, forces her to confront her memories and rearrange them into some more or less coherent relationship with the present.

Jankowska constructs her film in the same way that Mika reconstructs her memories—from fragments. Footage shot with thermal imaging, VHS, and digital cameras blends seamlessly with images captured on 35mm film. In this way, she creates an elusive, non-linear, collage-like story about identity, the relativity of time, and the fragile, subjective nature of memory. The protagonist reconnects with people who were once important to her: her first school-age love, her grandmother, her lover, and her former husband. Each encounter allows the viewer to understand Mika a little better. Every one of these unhurried meetings, which seem at first to change very little, requires her to reach back into the past and revisit old experiences, not necessarily pleasant ones. Memories begin to surface, and the invisible barrier that appeared to separate Mika from reality slowly disappears.

“Invisibility is what fascinates me most in cinema. Everything that cannot be seen, yet can still be sensed,” the director declares.

Jankowska divided the protagonist’s unusual journey into chapters entitled Brain, Heart, Blood, Spine, Stomach, and Death. These titles refer directly to the body—to what normally remains hidden from view. The opening and closing sequences further emphasize that Jankowska is primarily interested in telling stories about the invisible.

The thermal-camera images that open the film and the animated sequences that conclude it— inspired by the neurological imaging technique known as “brainbow,” which demonstrated that imagining an experience activates the same areas of the brain as actually living through it—depict phenomena that cannot be perceived with the naked eye. Filmed in infrared, the human body seems stripped of its materiality, yet the thermal camera simultaneously records the traces the body leaves behind when it comes into contact with matter.

“This invisibility is what fascinates me most in cinema. Everything that cannot be seen, yet can still be sensed. Infrared captured the essence of this film—human energy, what remains hidden,” Jankowska said in an interview for Newsweek.

“I like films that function as a form of hypnosis. Films in which one can meditate and simply exist,” says Ola Jankowska.

With her debut feature, Jankowska demonstrates—or rather reminds us—how much cinema still has to offer, how perfectly suited it is to constructing stories that are indirect and non-linear, stories more concerned with exploration than with providing answers; narratives built primarily through image and sound, but also through the viewers’ own projections and associations. In Anatomy, Jankowska gives the audience ample time and space. She never rushes, never pushes anyone forward. The film was recognized by one of the leading figures of slow cinema, Lav Diaz, who, as president of the jury, awarded Anatomy the Best Director prize at the 2022 International Film Festival of India in Kolkata, one of Asia’s most important film festivals.

The director herself admits that she is very fond of this kind of slow cinema. While working on Anatomy, she watched films by Carlos Reygadas, Edward Yang, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Angela Schanelec, among others.

“I would not call their films an inspiration. It was simply the kind of cinema that interested me at the time,” she said in an interview published on icsfilm.org.

“I like films that function as a form of hypnosis. Films in which one can meditate and simply exist. I would like the viewer, on a journey inward, to spend time in the film with their own breath. I do not want to tell a story solely through the protagonist; I want to create a space that can also accommodate the viewer, their emotions, and their projections,” she told Martyna Harland.

Today, Ola Jankowska lives in Berlin and is working on her second feature-length fiction film. This time, moving somewhat away from the tradition of slow cinema, she wants to tell the story of three women—a farmer, a servant, and a prostitute—whose lives intertwine in a magical, fairy-tale narrative exploring the dynamic between exploitation and sacrifice.