600 METRÓW KWADRATOWYCH WSPOMNIEŃ / 600 SQUARE METERS OF MEMORIES
documentary film, 55 minutes
Poland 2021
"This film is about a place that taught us how to be together, how to experience joys and failures, how to challenge rules and dispute discipline, explore our own and each others' boundaries. During all this process, we were also learning how to sing, dance, tap dance and be on stage. The film shows how this way of upbringing affected us. It recalls childhood stories and shows how they translate into today's reality," says one of the participants in the film.
600 Square Meters of Memories is a documentary, showing the history of Pantera, Poland's first amateur musical theater for children and youth, and the institution founded on it, the local center of culture called Dorożkarnia.
In a humorous way you could say that Dorożkarnia resembles a home, as both in terms of atmosphere and interior it has much of a home-like aura. The place was created in line with the author's method of working with young people. Anna Michalak-Pawłowska, the creator of the theater group Pantera and Cultural Center Dorożkarnia, explains: "We are not aiming to create artists, we want to raise sensitive young people for whom art is a tool for learning about the world. When they grow up, they may be doctors, lawyers or engineers, but thanks to being a part of the theater group for a while, singing songs or making movies, everything they learned in their childhood artistic life is still in them, so they are eager to go to the movies, theater, concerts and enroll their children in cultural activities."
The film was created by two visual artists, Marta Bogdańska and Karolina Sobel, who were invited to the project to provide a fresh look at the stories of the graduates, ask important questions and create a story about who the participants were and who they have become.
The film uses archive footage up to the 1980s and into the 2000s.
