Tuesday, November 19
4:30pm
LPAC 101 (Cinema)

THEATRE - POLLUTION - LAW


The Intersection of Art and Social Change

Michał Zadara's theatrical work has typically focused on political issues in the classical plays he has directed. His last two projects, however, have been different: JUSTICE (2018) and FILMS FROM THE SMOG YEARS (2019) are direct interventions into politics. In JUSTICE, Zadara worked with a team of historians and lawyers to research the Polish Communist Party's "anti-Zionist" campaign of 1968, as a result of which 13,000 Polish Jews were forced into exile. Exactly fifty years later, Zadara's team constructed a legal case against several journalists who are still alive and were involved in the campaign—and then made a play about it, in which four actors make the contemporary case against the journalists. In FILMS FROM THE SMOG YEARS, Zadara gathered a team of scientists, lawyers, and activists to research and write a Citizen's Clean Air Act that will be submitted to the Polish parliament--and simultaneously created a series of short films about the experience of living with polluted air with the involvement of some of Poland's most prominent actors. In both works, Zadara is looking for ways of creating works that contribute to progressive change in the world, and to do so in a spectacular way.