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.