While on a family trip in Poland years ago, the Montreal-based filmmaker Kinga Michalska discovered that the travel itinerary included an amusement park built very close to the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp. That shock became the inspiration for BEDROCK, Michalska’s powerful documentary about the often discomfiting and contradictory ways that the legacy of the Holocaust persists not just in similar locations all over Poland but in the lives of people living there. In regards to the latter, the film’s subjects range from a Jewish man dedicated to finding the forgotten remains of Holocaust victims to rowdy football supporters in the village of Birkenau. By considering the histories of these places alongside present-day signs of conflict and tension, Michalska’s incisive film serves as a timely warning that the potential cost of denying history is allowing it to repeat. There’s a Kingston connection, too — producer Danae Elon is a lecturer at Queen’s University.

BEDROCK is making an Ontario premiere at KCFF26!

Director: Kinga Michalska

Language: English, Polish with English subtitles

Runtime: 103 minutes

Content warning: discussion of death/violence, historical trauma

kinga michalska, director

Kinga Michalska is a queer Polish artist working in photography, film and video installation. Their work examines issues of identity, memory, displacement, and hauntings. Their practice looks at shared cultural spaces such as home, kinship, land, and memory through a queer feminist sensibility. They are interested in the periphery of who and what makes history: queer intimacies, amateur historians, geological processes, personal archives, oral history and speculative fictions. They create intimate, bold, visceral images with playful and sensual undertones. Their work is collaborative and rooted in informed consent with the participants. As questions of relations of power are at the core of their work, they are committed to questioning their own position within stories they tell and communities they represent in their work. 

danae elon, producer

Danae Elon is an award-winning filmmaker, producer, and cinematographer based in Montreal. A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, she has directed, produced, and shot a body of work that explores the relationship between the personal and the political through intimate and powerful narratives. Her thesis film Never Again Forever (1996) won the Golden Spire at the San Francisco International Film Festival and the Achievement Award at the Chicago International Film Festival. Her first feature documentary, Another Road Home (2004), premiered at Tribeca and went on to screen internationally at IDFA, Hot Docs, and numerous other festivals as well as be theatrically released in the US. With Partly Private (2009), Elon won the award for Best New York Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival. P.S. Jerusalem (2015) was selected at both the Berlinale and the Toronto International Film Festival, confirming her reputation as a bold voice in personal documentaries, the film was released theatrically and the New York times awarded it a critics pick. The Patriarch’s Room (2017) won Best Research and Music award at Docaviv and first prizes at both the LA Greek Film Festival and the Toronto Jewish Film Festival. Her film A Sister’s Song (2018), for which she also served as cinematographer, was awarded Best Documentary at the Doker Film Festival and received an Iris Award for Best Cinematography, and the AIDC Innovation Award.

Most recently, her feature Rule of Stone (2024) was selected at IDFA, CPH:DOX, and the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, while her short film Life of a Dog was produced with support from CBC. In addition to directing and producing, Elon has worked extensively as a cinematographer on her own films and in collaboration with other directors. The films she has produced screened as well at leading international festivals including Berlinale, Hot Docs, IDFA, Millennium and Sheffield. She is a recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in Film (2009) and has been supported numerous times by institutions such as the Sundance Institute, the Catapult Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, Quebec Arts Council, SODEC and CMF. Through her combined roles as director, producer, and cinematographer, Elon continues to develop a practice that bridges the deeply personal with the universally political.