Bedrock

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.