True story of Papusza - the first Roma woman who put her poems into writing and published them, and therefore confronted the traditional female image in the gypsy community. The film follows Papusza’s life from birth to old age: arranged marriage as a small girl, her life in a gypsy tabor before, during and after second world war, then forced settlement in communist Poland and urban life in poverty. Her meeting with the Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski, who discovered her great talent for poetry and published her works led to a tragic paradox: a famous poet was living in poverty, rejected by the Roma community, for betraying their secrets.

Direction: Krzysztof Krauze, Joanna Kos-Krauze

Script: Joanna Kos-Krauze, Krzysztof Krauze

Production: Lambros Ziotas, Lambros Ziotas

Cinematography: Krzysztof Ptak, Wojciech Staroń

Editing: Krzysztof Szpetmański

Production Design: Anna Wunderlich

Costume Design: Barbara Sikorska-Bouffał

Sound: Sebastian Witkowski, Jarosław Bajdowski, Mateusz Adamczyk

Original Score: Jan Kanty Pawluśkiewicz

Cast: Jowita Budnik, Antoni Pawlicki, Zbigniew Waleryś, Artur Steranko

Original Title: PAPUSZA

Original Languages: Polish, Romanian

Subtitles: English

Film Production Country: Poland

Website: http://www.papusza-film.pl

Statement of the Director/s
Papusza was a Roma girl, born in a carriage, an autodidact, who in the end
was mentioned in the world‘s encyclopedias and had her work translated into many languages. She was also named as one of the 60 most important women in Polish history. Isn‘t this an astonishing destiny worth to be told in an epic film? For us, it was also an opportunity to introduce the world of the Romas and to give it back its dignity.

The culture of the Roma has hardly ever been greeted with interest, evoking fear and aggression instead. With his monograph, Jerzy Ficowski has shed a new light on Roma people and contributed to a better understanding of that group. He confronted the schemes and prejudices, which had categorized Roma as demonic and worthless. We want to follow Jerzy’s steps and show our audience the pure and passionate soul of the Gypsy culture.

Beside the two main characters -Papusza and Jerzy Ficowski – there is a third „collective protagonist“, namely the gypsy world. Reconstructing Roma way of life, which has been extinguished in its original form from the European landscape, proved to be the biggest chalenge during our five year work on the film. Only after our work was finished, we have realised how daring a task it was to try to reconstruct this world from scratch, i.e. to build the tabors as they were and tell 80 years of Romas‘ history until the era of communist reign in Poland, which
resulted in compulsory Roma settlement. Especially as there is not much documentation available on the subject Roma and their extermination while at the same time there is massive body of research into prewar Jewish culture and the Holocaust.

Our film tells a story of a remarkable woman, who paid a terrible price for transgressing norms of her community and publishing her poetical works – a price of rejection and solitude. It is also
a story about love and a character who is way beyond her times and has the courage to stay true to herself until the very end.

It is not a biopic (in a sense that My Nikifor was also not a biography). It is not a socio-political film or a work with etnographic aspirations. It is a film about courage to create, the suffering
and being alone at the peak of popularity, unrequitted love and deviotion. But also about happiness.

Biography of the Director/s
Joanna Kos-Krauze and Krzysztof Krauze are Poland‘s leading film auteurs. Their work is characterised by a deep humanist approach and respect for their protagonists. Their first collaboration was Dług (Debt), directed by Krzysztof and jointly co-written. The film was recently chosen as the most important Polish production of the past twenty years. Altogether, their films have received more than 120 awards in Poland and around the world. Their films include Mój Nikifor (My Nikifor), a story about a forgotten painter (Award for Best Director in Karlovy Vary) and Plac Zbawiciela (Saviour Square), a drama about a toxic family.

World Sales:
New Europe Film Sales
Jan Naszewski
Czerniakowska 73/79
Warszawa, 00-718, Poland
E-Mail: [email protected]
Phone: +48600173205