Session 3. Sofia Bohdanowicz

MS Slavic 7
Sofia Bohdanowicz, Deragh Campbell, Canada, 2019, 64 min, DCP, colour, English

Point and Line to Plane
Sofia Bohdanowicz, Canada, 2020, 18 min, DCP, colour, English

 

In MS Slavic 7 Audrey Benac discovers a series of letters between her grandmother, poet Zofia Bohdanowiczowa, and Józef Wittlin, both of them Polish exiles from Nazism. Audrey comes up against the difficulties of investigating on her own, trying to come to terms with the political and poetic importance of these papers while, none of those around her —family, experts and archive— let her do everything she needs to. Loosely based on The Year Of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, Point and Line to Plane finds Audrey mourning the death of a friend. She visits places and ideas that linked them, trying to extract the colours and lines of Kandinsky and above all of Hilma af Klint, another forgotten pioneer. In the last two episodes in the saga of Audrey Benac so far, Bohdanowicz and Campbell explore different ways of joining the intimate and the historical in concise narratives that enquire into that special mechanism in the world that effaces women.