Pamięć oddechu / Breath Memory
Mairéad McClean

Wesele | A Wedding, 2025, 6.27min, 16mm

Wesele | A Wedding is a short experimental film composed from a reel of silent 8mm held in the Archive of Home Movies at the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw. In this reel, two separate events – a wedding and a day at the beach – have been accidentally superimposed. Filmed by a member of the Bujnowski family in 1970s Poland, the resulting double exposure creates a ghostly overlap of time and gesture, as if one memory is bleeding into another.

In the film, the footage is integrated with image and text from an old instruction manual once used by amateur filmmakers, offering guidance on how to frame a shot, what to record and how to shape a narrative. But these rules were often misunderstood, loosely interpreted or simply forgotten. Within the so-called mistakes, another kind of perfection can be found, one shaped by honesty, vulnerability and the unpredictable rhythms of everyday life.

Wesele | A Wedding  also draws on the physical qualities of film itself, its scratches, colour shifts and the gradual fading that comes with age, to evoke the fragility of memory, film and the human body. Nothing stays the same. We are not perfect. Yet within this imperfection lies something more truthful, a kind of beauty that resists control and reveals what is deeply human.

A Goodbye | a girl in the blue dress, 2025, 5min, 16mm

A Goodbye | a girl in the blue dress is a 5-minute 16mm film that opens with the line: Leaving came with a feeling, before the words, before the knowing.

The film features archival film from the Bujnowski family. Shot in colour in 1978, the footage shows a family preparing to leave from a city in Poland in 1978, surrounded by loved ones. At the centre, is a girl in a blue dress, visibly distressed. She hides behind her parents, turning her face from the camera. Her refusal to be seen, particularly to be seen upset, becomes the emotional core of the film. Still images held as the 16mm film camera rolls, leave an after-trace on screen, suggesting a fractured self: part here, part already gone. These images are interwoven with diagrams from an amateur film processing manual, echoing the imperfect recording of emotion and memory in colour film. A sparse soundscape of pizzicato strings, sustained tones and a distant Gregorian chant, recorded recently in a Warsaw chapel, deepens the atmosphere.

The film reflects on the quiet ruptures of migration and the lingering imprint of farewell.

Golden Delicious, 2025, 3.15min, 16mm

Golden Delicious opens in a 1970s Polish orchard: archive footage from the Archive of Home Movies shows a man in a suit moving between the trees, picking apples, tasting them, letting them fall. Quick flashes, like interference, cut to the filmmaker in a London park half a century later, re-performing his gestures. The present interrupts the past, folding into it in brief, flickering moments, until – in a quiet breach of the fourth wall – an apple leaves one era and appears in another.

By reversing the 8mm footage, the man seems to catch what she has thrown – a small act that unsettles the order of time. This is no neutral exchange: unlike a ball, the apple is held, bitten, chewed, its meaning taken in through the body. The film suggests the past can be entered, touched and returned, its meanings reformed with each encounter, echoing questions at the heart of quantum theory, where cause and effect need not move in a single direction.

A soundscape of echo, interference and crafted foley deepens the illusion, as if the filmmaker were in the orchard of the past, recording the sound.

The archival material for this film comes from the Janusz Dybkowski family.

For the Camera, 2025, 7min, 8mm

For the Camera reworks silent 1960s 8 mm footage of a man in a Polish People’s Army uniform and a woman, his love, who stage themselves before the lens—walking, waving, kissing, even filming each other in a mirror. Their gestures, tender yet deliberate, suggest not only intimacy but a wish to be remembered, to be seen as they hoped to be seen.

Friends, family, and a young girl—possibly the woman’s daughter—also appear, arranged as parallel strips of film so the viewer “edits” the material live, guided by a soundscape that pulls attention to specific spaces, movements and actions.

The original silent reel is re-inhabited with sound gathered elsewhere—trams in Leipzig, footsteps in Prague, layers of Chopin and Polish jazz—expanding the footage into a shared field of memory rather than a sealed family record.

Detached from kinship yet full of universal gestures, the film asks: what do we preserve when we perform for the camera? Are we fixing who we were, or who we wished to be? In the act of filming, what do we learn about ourselves? Echoing across time and place, the footage reminds us that memory is porous, unfinished and still speaking.

Cineland Zoom | 20 seconds, 2025, 8min, 16mm/ 8mm

Cineland Zoom | 20 seconds is made from a fragment of 8mm home movie footage filmed in London in 1970 by a Polish man visiting family from Communist-era Poland. By chance – or perhaps by instinct – his camera captures a solidarity march in support of Irish civil rights.

Extracted from a longer reel of family film, the work focuses not on the event itself, but on the act of noticing – on the moment when an ordinary gesture of filming becomes an unforeseen historical record.

The film also includes new footage shot by the filmmaker in 2025 at the same location, where she lifts her own 8mm camera in response – a quiet gesture of recognition and return.

Moving between past and present, between one body and another, the work reflects on how history is shaped not only by official record, but by attention, accident and whoever happens to be looking. 

The archival material for this film comes from The Bełżeccy Family archive within the Archive of Home Movies.