LAYERS OF TIME

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In the same place time may stop for somebody and keep flowing for the others. In my grandparents house there is an increasing collection of family photographs. It includes pictures of those who are no longer among us, and those who never were in our neighborhood, those who have always been here (as it seems to me...), and those who joined us and grew up with each next frame. There is only one photograph presenting another family. It was hanged on the wall in the dining room as a result of a certain meeting - the meeting which reminded my grandparents (and made me realize for the first time) the fact that our home can be a home of some other people who we don't know.

In 1991 a German woman named Karla took his husband George to Szczecin's district Pogodno to show him the place where she lived as a young girl. Unexpectedly she was invited to her former house, now belonging to Stefan and Helena. That was the beginning of a long acquaintance, nowadays called friendship by all of them. The moment of their meeting in 1991 is often recollected - it was something more than accident, however, in the face of most painfully remember events, certainly it was something less than fate. My grandfather calls it an accidental fate. For me it is a point where the four stories meet, quite different as far as facts are concerned, yet surprisingly similar in the dimension of most important personal experiences.

Helena always wanted to know who had lived before in her Pogodno house. Perhaps because in 1945 she herself had to live her town Jeziory, near Grodno. That's what she thinks about during sleepless nights. What are the recollections of Stefan, who spent his childhood in German Neuss? George understood quite well Karla's longing for Szczecin - possibly because after the war he had no opportunity to visit his Scottish homeland.

Within the project "Layers of Time" we are documenting the story related to the meeting. We started shooting one year ago and after many hours of recordings it's difficult for us to tell who is the main hero, what happened and what was transformed by the attempts to reach lost fragments of memory, or a need to not talking about everything. The simplest will to listen to some stories meets history on its way... The history of an extraordinary city, perhaps. The history of human relationships in the first place.

[ Martyna Głowacka ]

The project is accomplished in collaboration with the Pomerania Museum in Greifswald.

The presentation of the film is planned for November 2010.