
BEDROCK
95 min, Documentary, Canada, 2025Directed byKinga Michalska
Produced byFilmoption International
LanguagesEnglish, Polish
Bedrock is a psychological journey across today’s Poland that weaves together stories of Poles living on Holocaust sites. Through a series of intimate encounters, this poetic film looks at the unsettling contradictions people learn to live with.
Film details
Synopsis
Bedrock draws a psychological portrait of Poland from the perspective of Poles living on Holocaust sites today. This observational documentary is a quiet and subtle journey through a land where bones of the victims and the architecture of extermination are intimately intertwined with the protagonists’ lives. A little girl visits her friend in a psychiatric hospital that was once a concentration camp. A young Polish Jew takes on an impossible task of rescuing the remains of Jewish victims from destruction across the country. A Catholic family argues about Polish complicity in the pogrom in their small town as its annual commemoration approaches. Soccer fans from the village of Birkenau celebrate a victory of their local team. As we follow protagonists navigating many spaces of trauma in their daily routines, layers of identity, memory and complicity are slowly revealed. Poles are at once as victims, witnesses but also perpetrators. The film examines echoes of the violent past to confront the dystopian present.
Crew
Writing : Kinga Michalska
Cinematography : Hanna Linkowska
Editing : Omar Elhamy, Paul Chotel
Sound Design : Alex Lane
Music : Nadah El Shazly
Production : Paul Cadieux, Danae Elon, Ashley Duong
Executive Production : Anna Gawlita, Katarina Soukup
Direction

Kinga Michalska
Kinga Michalska is a Polish queer visual artist and filmmaker based in Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. Their work examines issues of memory, identity, displacement, and things that haunt us. They are interested in the periphery of who and what makes history. They hold a BA in Cultural Studies from the University of Warsaw and an MFA in Photography from Concordia University. Their work has been shown in multiple exhibitions and film festivals in Canada, Poland, UK, Korea, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany. Bedrock is their debut feature documentary.
Filmography
BEDROCK, 103 min, Documentary, 2025
VAMPIRES, ITS’ NOTHING TO LAUGH AT, 36 min, Documentary, 2023