Viktor Witkowski

“After I got to watch this very touching film, it is the political controversy about antisemitic betrayal that is staggering and most interesting. But I also loved the visual treatment as well as the musical collage. The director’s grandmother and main protagonist is fabulous and I never tired of listening to her experience. Towards the end of the film, we witness a pictorial dream sequence in which the protagonist meets her future husband; the pace, with the images fading like memories is poetic and right.”

Director and Academy Award Winner Volker Schlöndorff about In My Words

I first started interviewing and filming my grandmother in 2018. In early July 2021, I finally wrapped up filming and began editing three years worth of material. In My Words finished post-production in late 2023.

It is my most personal film to date as it focuses on my grandmother, my aunt, and our shared family history. Throughout the film we follow several aspects of my grandmother's life: her early years just before, during and right after WWII. Grandma Janina recalls growing up as teenager in a small village in Eastern Poland which is home to several Polish Jewish families. She vividly recounts the sudden and tragic turn of events when the occupying German forces set up an extermination camp in her village. After the war she moves to Western Poland where she meets her future husband, my grandfather. Both of them receive a plot of land which used to belong to a German family. The year their first daughter Dana is born, they start cultivating the land on their plot which eventually grows into a sizeable farm with wheat, corn, cattle, and dairy cows. The hard farm work pushes Dana to pursuit a career as doctor. After two failed attempts to enroll in university as a medical student during the height of Poland’s Communist rule, Dana gives up on her dream of a professional career. For the past fifteen years, she has been making a living as a private caretaker in Germany. During this time she spends months away from her mother, her sons, and her grand-children to be able to supplement her retirement income.

In My Words takes a close look at my grandmother’s and Dana’s life experiences which were shaped by history, national politics, tragic events, a lack of opportunities, but also by faith, resilience, and hope. In addition, the setting of this film - a lush and mountainous part of southwestern Poland - plays its own role by pointing to questions surrounding the notions of homeland, landscape, and nature. By combining features of a documentary with magical realism, the visuals of In My Words deliver a hallucinatory and poetic meditation on remembrance, absence, and experiences that cannot be put into words.