Viktor Witkowski’s Our Borderlands has an authentic beauty. It centers on three people living near the Poland-Germany border; the late Mr. Adamczyk, a local farmer, and two of whom are Witkowski’s family: his grandmother, Janina, and his aunt, Dana.
Witkowski’s interviewing, with few cuts, a focused trio of interviewees, and a half-hour runtime enables the audience to absorb each individual experience of borders, economic opportunity, and the universal currents of family and history. The audience isn’t preached to, nor is any point insinuated into the viewing perspective. Rather, from the starting narration, viewers are encouraged to exercise their autonomy of attention, by directing it to the wider fabric of the historical, geographical, and cultural scene. Local Polish nature is spotlighted throughout the film, with Witkowski’s voice encouraging the audience to listen to the landscape and its inherent, unspoken secrets. Visual effects are effectively used to enhance this emotional and metaphoric message, providing continuity to the documentary rather than being the centerpiece of filming as in other genres. The slight modification of natural features such as grottos, burrows, and moss indicates the magic and knowledge pulsing underneath them, appealing to a greater sense of the unknown. Witkowski does not project his sensibilities on the viewer, taking a more subtle approach of enhancement, and verbally inviting the viewers to take on an unconventional lens with him.
From the second title frame, Nasze pogranicze—Our Borderlands in Polish—viewers are brought into the act of translation. Differences in the Polish and English languages can be heard, as in the brevity of a phrase the subtitles signify means: “loved ones who are in their lives.”
Nature universalizes experience across borders in this film: between Germany and Poland (which Janina references as the “corners” her husband was from), between concentration camps and freedom, between the subjects and the viewers. Viktor Witkowski creates a shared “borderland” by inviting the audience into a liminal space.
This subtly powerful framework of interconnection asks for the audience members’ curiosity, and respects viewing intuition. Family photos and old footage are overlaid on present landscapes of forest and farm, wheat and soil, leaves and roots as stories of the past are shared. The documentarian knows how to draw the viewer into the mystique that accumulates with time and is felt in the gravity of the landscape holding it all.
The film’s pacing has a rare rhythm, creating space for one to breathe and absorb each beat of witnessing—each story is integrated within the broader setting of the woods, hallways connecting rooms. Further, the filmmaker’s presentation of his grandmother’s and aunt’s (and, by extension, Mr. Adamczyk’s) stories as more than “the lives they lived”, as connected to the wider organism of Poland and Germany—forest and farm, village and city, border and home, family and posterity, survival and work—sows an innate importance and mystery into their stories of family history and rural living. In Witkowski’s words these experiences are otherwise “romanticized or stigmatized” to warrant attention for an overlooked circumstance and way of life. He gives back the power of telling—if not framing, as Witkowski points the lens—as felt in the longer stretches of speaking by each interviewee. “This is how it happened,” Janina repeats, as she folds her hands and expresses a moment of loss. Witkowski’s camera work is unobtrusive to his dialogue with the interview subjects, allowing the audience to witness what’s exchanged with eye contact and nonverbal cues. Other elements of familial relations are absorbed through the lens in this way.
The nonverbal portrayal of the late Mr. Adamczyk under Dana’s narration non-intrusively connected his experience to that of Witkowski’s family, threading the needle before he spoke his own piece. Death is present in the storytelling from Mr. Adamczyk’s passing to stories of Janina’s husband, and the dissolving of ethereal, time-fossilized images against familiar landscapes, stone and ground. It reminds us that time moves on and takes all with it.
An overall touching and sensitive film where the subjects are truly listened to. Viewers will enjoy the careful pacing and affectionate drawing of attention to this era and place as a breathing whole.
Our Borderlands will be screening as part of the New Jersey International Film Festival Short Documentary Program on Sunday, June 1, 2025 – Online for 24 Hours and In-Person at 5PM in Voorhees Hall #105/Rutgers University, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, NJ. There will be a Q+A session with many of the directors after the in-person screening. Get more info here.
The 30th annual New Jersey International Film Festival will be taking place between May 30-June 13, 2025. The Festival will be a hybrid one as we will be presenting it online as well as doing select in-person screenings at Rutgers University. All the films will be available virtually via Video on Demand for 24 hours on their show date. VOD start times are at 12 Midnight Eastern USA. Each General Admission Ticket or Festival Pass purchased is good for both the virtual and the in-person when both are offered. Plus, we are very proud to announce that acclaimed singer-songwriter Mike Kovacs will be doing an audio-visual concert on Friday, June 13 at 7PM! The in-person screenings and the Mike Kovacs concert will be held in Voorhees Hall #105/Rutgers University, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, NJ beginning at 5PM or 7PM on their show date. General Admission Ticket=$15 Per Program; Festival All Access Pass=$120; In-Person Only Student Ticket=$10 Per Program.
For more info go here: https://2025newjerseyinternationalfilmfestival.eventive.org/welcome
