A Non-Western Exchange: Looking Back at Transnational Cinema Education in the Cold War Eastern Bloc
From the 1950s through the end of the 1980s, the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague and Poland’s Łódź Film School attracted hundreds of students from countries including Syria, Algeria, Iran, India, Colombia, and Cuba. Student fellowships brought artists from newly independent nations in Africa, Latin America, and Asia to Central Eastern Europe to travel and study. Many were citizens of countries ideologically aligned with the Eastern Bloc.
The authorities saw these exchanges as a means to promote global socialist solidarity. The schools became important nodes of international exchange, where students tackled a variety of subjects in their work: youth and coming of age, family relations and romance, as well as postcolonial and racialized experiences in the bloc. Few criticized their host nations outright, but their explorations of their lived experiences as visitors to the Eastern Bloc countered the fantasy of a color-blind, international socialist brotherhood. In this roundtable discussion, curators and art historians Magda Lipska, Monika Talarczyk, and Tereza Stejskalová reflect on the legacy of these student exchanges.
Pavel Pyś
How would you thematize strands that were recurrent in your research?
Monika Talarczyk
The transnational flows in film art. I was curious to what extent those students from the Global South were influenced by Polish lecturers, usually with strong personalities. On the other hand, what were the subjects, qualities, they introduced to student film to break the monolith of white Central European society. Wojciech J. Has and Kazimierz Karabasz were their masters, obviously, but also Wanda Jakubowska and Henryk Kluba, especially when it came to politics. Kaweh Pur Rahnama, a political refugee from Iran, directed a feature film No Way Back, Johnny (1969)—the only film in Polish cinema about the Vietnam war. Thanks to the Derkaoui brothers, some echoes of May ’68 in Paris and the French General States of Film Industry came to Łódź.
Due to Roupen Vosquimoroukian from Lebanon, people in Łódź could watch the documentary of the Al-Baka refugee camp (watch this film, Report September 1969, here). It was during the time of the March ’68 campaign and its consequences to the Polish Jews, so it was important to take into account the other side of the conflict. In general, the études by students from the Global South opened Łódź to more global flows and influences that went beyond the official foreign policy and internal interests.
Magda Lipska
I would also add the race issue, which certainly was one of the main focuses for me. Mostafa Derkaoui made a really beautiful short film in 1968 called The Adoption (available to watch here), in which he covered the history of adoption of Agnieszka, a mixed-race child from an orphanage in Łódź. The mother of Agnieszka left her after birth. In the film, we see a closeup of Agnieszka playing alone in the orphanage, and from off [camera] we hear a conversation of a couple wanting to adopt a girl, and Agnieszka is the only available one. There is no direct mention of Agnieszka’s skin color, but from the hesitation and the pauses it is clear that Agnieszka will not be adopted due to her mixed race. Derkaoui staged an imagined situation, one he could easily witness in Poland.
Funnily enough, Agnieszka was later adopted by a Polish couple, friends of Mostafa Derkaoui. But there were other examples of the “race question” that could be read from the student films. Hamid Bensaid made a 1971 film called Zofia and Ludmiła (available to watch here) about two Roma sisters who are regularly harassed at school by a teacher. Despite the official propaganda and slogans of equality, Bensaid’s eye and ear were very sensitive to the local racial tensions, indiscernible to other students.
Tereza Stejskalová
I am also interested in racism, the way it manifested itself in a socialist society that saw itself as very progressive in this respect. Films by students from the Global South have captured this paradox in very interesting ways—for example, Krishna Vishwanath’s Black and White (1968). But I’m also interested in student films as specific documentaries that problematize our standard, individual conception of authorship. They are documents of cultural exchange where it is hard to say who actually the author is—are foreign students or European educators/filmmakers responsible for their statement? I’m interested in those student films that are critical of state socialist society, but this criticality was part of the socialist film education of those schools. Did this criticality come from the students’ experience, or the state socialist system of film education? Probably from both. Also, our research defies the standard hierarchies of film history, I believe. Some of the incredible films I exhibited were made by people who never had “successful” film careers.
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Idriss Karim, Elzbieta K., 1973. Courtesy Lodz Film School. -
Idriss Karim, Marta, 1969. Courtesy Lodz Film School.
PP
What surprised you? What areas of connectivity between FAMU and Łódź and students from the Global South surprised you?
MT
Surprisingly, it turned out that only in Łódź was it a totally male experience, contrary to VGiK, Babelsberg, or FAMU. Am I right, Tereza? Almost no women from the Global South applied or were accepted to the film school in Łódź. The only exception was Beverly Joan Marcus, a white woman from the Republic of South Africa who arrived to study film direction at turn of the late 70s into the 1980s. On the other hand, students from the Global South cooperated with Polish women who studied cinematography then—for example with Ewa Strzałka (on the cover of our book) or Jolanta Dylewska, at present dean of direction of the Photography Department at the Polish National Film School in Łódź. Their études were not deprived of a feminine point of view. Some of them even thematized the issue of being looked-at-ness or double-burden (see Elżbieta K. and Marta by Idriss Karim, 1973). Some of them cooperated with Polish artists, like Abdelkader Lagtaa with Ewa Partum. But in general, no women of color attended the Film School in Łódź during the Cold War.
Watch Elzbieta K here
Watch Marta here
Watch Nord Sud here
ML
My impression at the time of our research was that there was little connection between the film schools. Poland and other Eastern countries were capsules immersed in themselves. If connections to the outside worlds existed, then they were to the West rather than any Eastern European country.
MT
I would not agree, because Polish students studied at FAMU and VGiK then. I have also found many collective études, I mean Polish-German, at the archives of Konrad Wolf Film University in Potsdam Babelsberg. But if you mean that the students from the Global South were not in touch with others from their countries studying in the other film schools in the Eastern Bloc, it can be true. Mobility had its limits during the Cold War era.
TS
I agree with Monika, the gender issue is very interesting. Yes, indeed, there were women at FAMU, and interestingly, they were overwhelmingly from Latin America. I also noticed that many of the films thematize women’s issues. Besides being collaborators, women often became girlfriends or friends of the students, in some cases their wives and mothers of their children; they provided the necessary care and emotional labor. Sometimes also the older women played the role of key support figures. An interesting case is that of a female official at the University of 17 November, Marie Drbalová, who played a key role as a psychological support for students, including film students. She was a Holocaust survivor. I’m interested in these connections of “outsiders” across gender, class, and race. I was also struck by the issue of mental health. In one documentary film about Global South students in Czechoslovakia by Juan Carlos, Delgado from Elsewhere (1986), there is an interview with a psychiatrist working in a mental asylum. We are confronted with images of young men of color lying in hospital beds as the voiceover reports on the numerous cases of foreign students who were committed because they could not deal with the reality of life in Czechoslovakia. Also many former FAMU students of color I interviewed reported that many of their friends at the time just could not deal with the Czechoslovak environment. That was overwhelming.
PP
How did the students’ experiences in Eastern Europe impact their work and lives upon return to their home countries?
MT
Well, that’s the issue. They were educated to the modern state-film industry, but usually they came back to their home developing country with incomparable film infrastructures and only modest state support to film art. Moreover, they weren’t educated to compete in a capitalist film market. For sure, they were well educated in film craft and inspired by Polish film. Some cinematographers succeeded in filmmaking for Western television, like Roupen Vosquimoroukian. The Derkaoui brothers brought fundaments to the Moroccan cinema with their New Wave long feature debut Some Meaningless Events (1974). Sao Gamba, a pioneer of Kenyan cinema, directed the first movie with all an Kenyan crew, cast, and funds, Kolormask (1986). So they blazed a trail in their home countries’ cinema, but their career path was not as continuous and developing as it could be.
ML
I don’t quite agree with Monika. It’s true that conditions in their home countries were different; most of them returned to a really nascent film industry. But the way they worked was really very much influenced by Łódź. Some Meaningless Events, a film by Mostafa Derkaoui, was a straightforward continuation of his earlier films from the film school: Cellar People (1969) and Somewhere, Someday (1971). Abdelkader Lagtaa tried to make socially engaged documentaries, as much as the political situation in Morocco allowed him to. So to me, the Polish influence is really visible in their film practice. Probably one of the most dramatic impacts that Polish experience had on many of the students we talked to was the influence on their political beliefs: they arrived as convicted communists and left rather disappointed by the communist system (laughs).
TS
It is hard to generalize. The students came from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, from very different environments. It played a role if they came from or returned to a state socialist country. Sometimes, they came from a socialist country but were supposed to return to a different regime (like in the case of Indonesia, for instance). Some young filmmakers were discriminated against, because they studied in a communist country (like Piyasiri Gunaratna from Sri Lanka). Others not, on the contrary, and they played a key role in setting up the local state-film infrastructure (such as Nabil Maleh in Syria). Others took their experience elsewhere. Many others quit filmmaking altogether. The former students I had the opportunity to talk to or read interviews with had very good memories of their years at FAMU. They generally had an admiring relationship with Czech culture. They were young and inexperienced, and FAMU was the place where they gained their first professional experience, a Western-oriented cultural education, and came of age. Their stay in Czechoslovakia had a significant influence on their political and aesthetic worldviews.
PP
How was official cultural policy imposed (or not) on students? How did students confront “socialist cultural production”?
MT
Well, they chose the Łódź Film School because they were inspired by Andrzej Wajda’s films Generations and Ashes and Diamonds. At the place, they were even more impressed with Polish film and theater production. I guess we cannot say that official cultural policy was somehow imposed on them; the time of socialist realism was over. What is more, the Łódź Film School was considered “an island” on the map of Łódź and the whole country. Even during the Stalinist era, students could watch movies that were not officially approved to be screened in cinemas.
ML
Foreign students studying in communist Poland were not obliged to attend the compulsory courses in Marxism and Leninism. This is what differentiated them strongly from their Polish peers. Polish authorities realized quite quickly that forced education in communist ideology would not pay off if they wanted to build a positive image of Poland outside its borders.
TS
It depends on the period, again. It is hard to generalize. It was a different atmosphere in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s, both in the general society and in the school. Nabil Maleh from Syria recalls that, unlike in the West, in Prague one could go to great concerts, cinema, or theater for almost no money. Cultural life was more accessible. Of course, that was in the late ’60s, during the time when reformist communists were in power and Czechoslovakia enjoyed, literally, a cultural renaissance and relatively little censorship. But in general, one can say that FAMU, like Łódź Film School, was an island where more freedom was possible than in a society where freedom of speech was quite restricted.
PP
Was connectivity sustained?
MT
Some connectivity was sustained due to the private bonds between Łódź Film School graduates from the Global South and Polish women. For example, Faycal Hassairi’s daughter, Zuzanna Hassairi-Zachara, has just completed studies in cinematography and is considered to be one of the most talented young cinematographers. There are also intergenerational bonds between Cold War generations and later ones. For example, Jakub Barua from Kenya, who studied film directing in Łódź in the ’90s, helped us to trace Sao Gamba’s path. Mohammed Almughanni from Palestine, who graduated from Łódź Film School in 2020, happens to know Faycal Hassairi and Chauki Mejeri from Tunis. But these examples are singular. I can’t tell [whether] the North-South connection is being sustained. But the book, I guess, can help. In June we hosted a delegation from Kenya.
ML
The 1960s, when the student exchanges in the film school began, and the late 1980s, when they stopped, are two quite different periods. As Monika Bobako argues in her text in our book Hope is of a Different Color, the period between 1967 and 1968 marked a defining threshold between those two eras: the era of enthusiasm and the era of disappointment and depression. March 1968 in Poland is a year of the heavy purges against the Jewish community, in consequence of which a majority of the Jewish population went into exile. A year earlier, the Six-Day War broke out, which changed the political relations in the Arab World. As Bobako points out, those two events marked a beginning of the end of the internationalist project in the Peoples’ Republic of Poland, introducing a more nationalist direction. This is also strongly evidenced in the students' film from the 1980s, marked by depression, hostility against foreigners, and marasm of the Polish population. There is little connectivity between those two eras; they seem to be completely different epochs.
TS
I very much agree with the change of atmosphere in the 1970s and 1980s, also evidenced in the films. I also agree that there were mostly private connections that remained. Some of the children of those former students who live in the Czech Republic are very well known as actors and directors—for example, the children of Moris and Michel Issa from Syria. The systematic support of film students from Global South, however, disappeared in 1989. In the 1980s, a special department was founded at FAMU specifically for foreign students with English and French as teaching languages. It was an institution within an institution. Today, it survives as a FAMU International program, but its students, unlike those enrolled in regular programs taught in Czech, who study for free, have to pay fees.
PP
What is the legacy, from today’s viewpoint, of these exchanges and experiences?
ML
Well, it’s difficult to say yet. Some further research certainly would need to be conducted. Poland and the rest of the former Eastern Bloc was and still is very West-oriented. Especially after the fall of communism. So the tie with the Global South is something that only recently has been brought up again, thematized, and researched. To me, the really visible legacy of these connections is still present in the Global South. Polish cinema, theater, and art, due to the formerly existing connections in the 1960s and ’70s, are pretty much known, especially in North Africa and the Middle East. I’m always surprised that Polish documentary films are circulating in the Arab World; the reverse is not really the case. Łukasz Stanek, in his recent book, Architecture in Global Socialism, also evidenced this phenomenon. But the situation is slowly changing, also due to the new generation of artists, filmmakers from both sides, that are more and more interested in the experiences of their predecessors, oftentimes parents. They want to know more about the past and discover their identity without resigning from one or the other part of it.
TS
I agree with Magda. The former students took the legacy and tradition of Czechoslovak filmmaking to their own countries. However, here in the Czech Republic they were completely forgotten. Nevertheless, their legacy is essential. As Jacob Micanowski argues, Eastern Europe had been a more culturally heterogeneous space than the West. This changed after WWII. My research was motivated from the refugee crisis in 2016, when politicians from Central and Eastern Europe claimed that “our” culture was incompatible with “theirs,” and that is why the refugees should go elsewhere. The student films are documents of a transnational circulation of images and ideas, sometimes in accordance and, often, in spite of the state socialist regimes and their politics of cultural diplomacy. However, they also provide an opportunity for us to have a “historical experience” of state socialism, as Boris Buden conceptualizes it. They provide an opportunity to learn from the past and to conceptualize differently our future, here in Central East Europe, but perhaps also elsewhere, in terms of the co-existence and co-living of very differently classed, racialized, and gendered bodies.▪︎
Discover more about this topic and more in the exhibition Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in Central Eastern Europe, 1960s–1980s for yourself at the Walker Art Center Nov 11, 2023–Mar 10, 2024.
Want to learn more about the artists and ideas around this exhibition? Get the exhibition catalogue at shop.walkerart.org
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