2014/2016
00:49:27, audio-video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISc8o0hwR_0

collaboration: Aleksander Blaszkiewicz, Marta Hryniuk, Jan Jęchorek, Piotr Kurka, Wiktor Łapa, Krzysztof Łukomski, Agnieszka Miężał, Maciej Nowacki, and Zosia Pieńkowska; photography: Marta Węglińska, Marcin Ptaszyński, Patrycja Plich; music: Marta Knaflewska; voiceover: Anna Prętka
zdjęcia: Marta Węglińska, Marcin Ptaszyński, Patrycja Plich
muzyka: Marta Knaflewska
lektorka: Ania Prętka

An experimental film created as a result of long-term, field-based performative activities carried out with a group of nine participants.

"The Smuggler" is an essayistic film that straddles the boundaries between performance, documentary, and speculative fiction. The project revolves around the themes of unexplained conspiracy, metaphorical smuggling, and circulating knowledge, rooted in the relationship between humans and the landscape and memory of a place. The film is set in a forest area of former fortifications—a space shaped by artificial hills, valleys, and concrete ruins, which act not as a backdrop but as an active participant in the events.

The film is the result of long-term fieldwork and a series of performative situations carried out with people without acting experience. Their presence oscillates between autobiographical testimony, improvisation, and a consciously constructed role. The script remains open and subject to change, and the narrative is created in the process - through conversations, monologues, interviews, and on-camera activities. This way of working places the film within the expanded documentary genre and practices that utilize processuality, uncertainty, and collective production of meaning.

The central theme of the film is the tension between mapping and disorientation, knowledge and intuition, memory and fiction. Recurring images of grids, lines, routes, and gates intertwine with stories of disturbed perception, paranoid thought structures, and the experience of landscape as a field of control, experimentation, or initiation. The phrase “blood is almost chlorophyll” spoken in the film becomes a symbolic point of contact between the human body and biological processes, suggesting a posthumanist perspective in which the boundaries between nature and culture become blurred.

Dialogue and voice play a causal role in The Smuggler - it does not illustrate the image, but constitute it, revealing a multi-layered network of relationships between the participants, the place, and the growing narrative of conspiracy. The film operates in an atmosphere close to that of Andrei Tarkovsky's cinema, but instead of metaphysics, it focuses on the contemporary experience of anxiety, confusion, and the loss of stable cognitive frameworks.

„Przemytnik” lokuje się na styku kina performatywnego, praktyk terenowych i artystycznego researchu, traktując krajobraz jako archiwum afektów, pamięci i spekulatywnych opowieści. To film o przenikaniu się fikcji i rzeczywistości, w którym sam proces poszukiwania staje się głównym przedmiotem pracy artystycznej.