Short film about a Hungarian vibrator factory caused a scandal in Poland

At the beginning of March, a Polish film festival was cancelled by the Minister of Culture just a day before its planned opening. Moreover, the director of the National Film Archives – Audiovisual Institute, organiser of the festival, was dismissed. Two short films were the reason behind such actions, one of them with strong ties to Hungary.

Many people in Poland have been fighting for fundamental rights and social issues for quite a while now, be it the right for women to decide what to do with their own bodies or the issue of same-sex couples. Aggression against and abuse of women is a subject that still resurfaces from time to time in Poland as well. This exact issue, more precisely, a short film about the abuse of women, was one of the reasons an online film festival called Herstorie was cancelled at the very last minute. It was organised by the Polish Film Archives between the 4th and 8th of March on the institute’s website, Ninoteka, for International Women’s Day.

According to Hvg.hu, which refers to information obtained by Gazeta Wyborcza,

the festival was “suspended for an undetermined period of time”, right on the 3^rd of March by a ministerial decision, while the director of the Archives, Dariusz Wieromiejczyk, was dismissed from his duties and replaced.

According to the journal, the previous director was notified in a phone call by Jaroslaw Sellin, Deputy Minister, to cancel the festival immediately.

When Wieromiejczyk asked for a reason to do so, he was told that Piotr Glinski, Minister of Culture, based his decision on two films. One of them is the aforementioned film directed by Karina Paciorkowska, titled You Don’t Have Distance, while the other one is a 6-minute short film (embedded below) called Vibrant Village, directed by Weronika Jurkiewicz. The latter short film, which was

shot in a little Hungarian village, presents a small Hungarian factory producing vibrators.

None of them would be a novelty as they already hit the big screen in several festivals, both in Poland and outside the country. The Hungarian short film, for instance, was presented to the public during the 17th Verzió Film Festival in Hungary.

After receiving the official reason to postpone the festival, with which the former director of the Archives did not agree, he wrote a letter to the Minister himself, asking for an audience.

“These films are simply about the problems of women living in a modern world. There is nothing shocking, destructive, or morally repulsive about them.

The majority of them won several festival awards. I stand by my opinion that changing the selection of films one day prior to the festival would be regarded inexplicable and would destroy the image of the festival,” wrote Wieromiejczyk in his letter to Glinkski two days before the online event. Their brief conversation ended with the director resigning.

Source: hvg.hu

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