Cela

“Cela considers that her overjoyed happiness as a grandmother is a miracle. She tells the story of her life, which is as turbulent as that of her homeland. Poland. We discover that she has nostalgically harboured the romantic memory of a war-time love for a Frenchman, whom she met in one of the camps and long treasured as a dream… Since my Childhood, this story has often been told to me. (…) Beyond the personal memory of an elderly woman who recounts those episodes from her youth that Cela wished to hand down to me, there is also the collective story of an entire people that, despite centuries of occupation, has managed to keep its cultural identity alive by making a sort of cult of its memory (…) My father left Poland in the sixties. I was born in France, and this is where I have made my life. Yet, I am endlessly drawn back to Poland, as it haunted by its tormented past, to search for its traces and origins.” (Rafaël Lewandowski)