Nowa Huta, a ghostly industrial agglomeration near Krakow, was created in 1949 as a product of the industrial creationism of the Stalin era. Endless symmetric avenues, steel mills, power plants, and prefab housing estates. Today, only a fraction of the residents work in the mills, while the others live on the edge of poverty or have found a foothold in the post-privatization services sector. The spirit of Solidarity and industrial megalomania has long since disappeared, but its remnants continue to smolder. An up-to-date look at a genius loci made up of the city’s diverse social groups. Photogenic images of a place that has been transformed into a monumental stage set of ruin. The film is a portrait of a city that considers itself contemporary in the best sense of the term, a film about the here and now (and its many histories).
About the director
Dariusz Kowalski (1971, Kraków) lives and works in Vienna and Linz. He studied visual media design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and is an assistant at the University for Artistic and Industrial Design Linz. Kowalski’s work has received numerous awards over the years.