Grandmamauntsistercat

Using film archives from the collection of the Łódź Educational Film Studio—an audiovisual corpus assembled during Poland’s communist era and steeped in propaganda—Zuza Banasińska forges a caustic counter-narrative. The film poses a subtle question: how can one work with negative archival material, with images we do not agree with? It explores this through the invention of Baba Yaga, a prehistoric matriarchal goddess whose rumor drifts through the voice-over of a child guide. This creature comments on the images of her own birth and introduces us to her family, made up of a grandmother, a mother, an aunt, a sister, and a cat. Through this commentary and a distorted voice, an esoteric bond is formed among these beings—like an invisible, ancient membrane reverberating through the stream of images. What emanates is a seductive monstrosity, a secret principle, a conceptual undermining, a perpetual regeneration.

Through its editing rhythm, its ironic effects, and its repurposing of primary materials, Grandmamauntsistercat unleashes an energetic surge—a counter-documentation of a patriarchy congealed into soft, biological forms. At times, it’s a stretching mollusk, dancing molecules, or a glottis opening and closing, and as they are seized by the child's intonations and narration, they undergo a second birth—dislocated and boisterous.

Maude Trottier
Editor-in-Chief, Hors champ magazine