film, 29 min

Professor Konrad Ciszowski has spent years studying sunspots and their impact on climate degradation. They, and not human intervention into nature, are presumably the reason for the advancing climate crisis leading to the inevitable: flooding of cities in the Bay of Gdańsk by the Baltic Sea. In collaboration with a group of enthusiastic students, the professor builds a space probe. Its name, Svarog, is derived from the Slavic solar deity. Will it help Professor Ciszowski’s team find out how to prevent climate change?
The award-winning Potencja Film Studio has created a daring tale about the impending disaster. What unites the Wrzeszcz edition of NARRACJE, the Czech dream about the Polish sea reaching the Karkonosze Mountains and Professor Ciszowski’s research inspired by Slavic mythology? Could the end, predicted to come in dozens (if not hundreds?) of years, in fact happen faster than we think?

Potencja is an artist trio that has been active continuously since 2012. What the works of Karolina Jabłońska, Tomek Kręcicki and Cyryl Polaczek have in common is not just their formal similarity – which may be confusing at times – but also a punk temper and constant enthusiasm for action. The seeming triviality of their art provokes viewers to play a game that enables them to discover the complexity of things and situations around us. Potencja is also a film studio producing a number of witty DIY features, a painting-focused gallery adding colour to the Kraków art scene since 2015 and Łałok, a wannabe art tabloid. The three artists reside in Kraków.

Teaser of the narrative sci-fi film produced by Potencja, inspired by futuristic scenarios for the development of Wrzeszcz and popular B-class movies:

Behind the scenes documentation (photographs: Bartek Bańka):

fot. Stan Barański