15/11/2024 - The Polish filmmaker traces the genesis of a very ambitious film that blends together the great History and the small one, collaboration and resistance, adventure, family and love

(© Aurélie Lamachère/Arras Film Festival)

Emeritus cinematographer who first directed documentaries, then a first fiction feature with The Red Spider [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Marcin Koszalka
film profile] (in competition in Karlovy Vary in 2015), Polish filmmaker Marcin Koszałka is in competition at the 25th Arras Film Festival with White Courage [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Marcin Koszałka
film profile], winner of several awards at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia and a box-office success in its home country.

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Cineuropa: With Declaration of Immortality in 2010, you’d already directed a documentary on mountaineering in the Tatras mountains. Did this passion guide you towards White Courage, a fiction film about the dark episode of the “Goralenvolk”?
Marcin Koszałka: I started mountaineering in the mid-1980s and I met fascinating personalities, in particular the himalayists. It was then my biggest passion. What’s always interested me is people put in extraordinary circumstances. After my sociology studies, I enrolled in a film school, in the cinematography department. That’s when I stopped high-level mountaineering, but I still practise it as a hobby. About 20 years ago, I’d heard about the “Goralenvolk”, when Polish Highlanders collaborated with the Nazis, a very dark and buried chapter in the history of Poland. These Highlanders are a wonderful people with a specific culture, traditions, dances, mountains, and they are perceived and represented only in a positive light by the rest of Poland. Six years ago, I therefore decided to connect this historical episode to my passion for mountaineering and to make a film about it.

Was the research phase in order to write the script with Lukasz M. Maciejewski long?
Yes, because we had very little information. This story is taboo. In the Polish mentality, we want to see ourselves as heroes, whether it be in the Napoleonian period or during World War Two, and many politicians and historians in Poland claim that there’s never been any collaboration in Poland. Nevertheless, at the script-writing stage, we knew we didn’t want to make a typically Polish historical film, but instead to try a personal approach, bordering on auteur cinema. The research and writing phase was very long, it took us years. It is a true story, but we’ve modified the main characters, they are not the same as the original characters. What was delicate was the topic of nationalism, because the main protagonist collaborates with the Nazis in a non-Manichean way: he is in the grey zone. It is important to know that that region used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and had only been Polish for 20 years at that time. Many of its inhabitants spoke German. Some had anticipated the Nazis’ desire for pan-European destruction, but they had also seen in it a chance to free themselves, to become an autonomous territory, but also to simply survive. It is actually incredible that I received funds from the previous Polish government with this story, yet we were nevertheless asked not to release the film before the elections. The budget was only €3,7m, but we made the most of what we had.

Are blood relations the film’s central theme?
The major topic is love in tragedy, the act of taking dramatic decisions. The two brothers will make opposite choices. This is the engine of dramaturgy. Toxic family and love are a constant and an obsession in my films. In White Courage, the parents have a toxic influence on their children, with a backdrop of economic interests that are amplified by traditions.

How did you direct the spectacular mountaineering sequences?
I wanted to shoot these scenes in a realistic fashion. That was possible because I knew the best experts and we worked like a commando, preparing months in advance with as much precision as possible.

You also took care of the film’s cinematography. What were your main intentions in that regard and in terms of mise en scène?
For me, the setting and the frame are what’s most important. The acting counts, of course, but it comes second. I never rehearse with actors because I think it is the casting that’s essential, together with talking about the vision of the characters, and because I like to maintain a kind of freshness when shooting. The camera must then adapt to the performers. I globally function based on my intuition, but I think about camera movements ahead of time in order to know whether I’ll shoot this or that scene with a still or a moving camera. For this film, I spent a lot of time studying paintings representing Highlanders that were produced by Polish artists before the Second World War, as well as many photographs from that time. Then, we created a book of colours, including a guiding idea for the combination of colours for each scene, with my set designer Elwira Pluta. I like to use natural light, but it is on set that I refine all this.

(Translated from French)