8 . Sous la terre de Polin , Ania Szczepanska © Bachibouzouk-Les poissons volants
9 . Sous la terre de Polin , Ania Szczepanska © Bachibouzouk-Les poissons volants
10 . Sous la terre de Polin , Ania Szczepanska © Bachibouzouk-Les poissons volants
11 . Sous la terre de Polin , Ania Szczepanska © Bachibouzouk-Les poissons volants four convoys that left France for Sobibor , because the film did not consider the specifically French memorial dimension of the extermination . I will also say that archaeologists , who sometimes suffer from a type of “ inferiority complex ” compared to historians in terms of contemporary history , have taken up the film with enthusiasm and are screening it in packed rooms in many festivals linked to the discipline . They are very sensitive to the moral and material dimension of their praxis shown in the film , as a form of recognition of their contribution . But this distinction is not active everywhere : during a screening at the El Born Centre for Culture and Memory in Barcelona , I noticed a keen sensitivity to the issues of the film . The audience was nonspecialist , but it was also reminded of powerful issues sending them back to an obfuscated memory of the Spanish Civil War in Catalonia , of historians , archaeologists and anthropologists working together on the mass graves of 1936 . The audience was less historically and emotionally close to the genocide of the Jews , but showed a remarkably acute intellectual sensitivity to the questions posed by the film . Perhaps the famous universality of film lies there , in the ability to mirror questioning based on empathy .
There is still one issue that bothers me : the film has not yet been seen in Poland , despite the strong
desire and support of everyone involved and despite its character , rooted in Poland today . The State Museum at Majdanek , the supervisory authority of the Sobibor branch , refused to screen the film and even to be associated with it . Wider distribution on television is not on the agenda , unlike what took place in France .
Ania Szczepanska : Here , the fate of your film perfectly confirms the wars over memory concerning the writing of the history of the Shoah in Poland , which have been revived since the PiS ( Law and Justice Party ) returned to power in 2016 . Evidence of this includes the struggle over what has been called “ the new Polish school of the history of the Shoah ” and the attacks it has regularly suffered since the 2018 law was enacted against researchers who “ sully the image of Poland ”. As Jean-Charles Szurek and Annette Wieviorka write in the introduction to their collective work Les Polonais et la Shoah ( 2019 ): “ The political regression of a Poland returning to its nationalist fundamentals is articulated with a coordinated effort of historiographical backsliding ”. That your film Sheol has been non grata in Poland so far , proves the climate of fear in which the heads of institutions have been working into , but it also implicitly confirms the political power of cinema .
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