Homecomings intrigue Chicago filmmaker Marian Marzynski. Born in Warsaw, Marzynski, 57, made his debut documentary, A Ship’s Return, in 1963 when the first cruise ship of Polish Americans revisited iron-curtain Poland. In 1981 he made Return to Poland, about his own trip back from the U.S. In Duo Bravo, made in 1992, Marzynski followed a Mexican family’s bittersweet journey from Chicago back home.
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Marzynski started documenting the psychic landscapes of exiles and emigrants when the boatload of Polish Americans arrived in 1963. He covered the occasion for live radio and television. “I was a pioneer of the live TV talk show in Poland,” he said. “I was a kind of combination of Donahue and Oprah. I was the first to invite the public in for discussions of political issues, which was a big achievement under censorship.”
The remarkable homecoming story inspired Marzynski to then make A Ship’s Return, christening his career as a documentary filmmaker. He directed 15 other 35-millimeter films in Poland.
He tracks the highly charged homecomings of three elderly Jews to the village of Bransk, where 2,500 Jews lived before most were carted off to Treblinka’s gas chambers. The ambivalent pilgrims in Shtetl come from Baltimore, Caracas, and Chicago. They face old neighbors–some were betrayers, others were saviors. One returning visitor wants to deed his ancestral land to the family that protected him from the Holocaust.
As the VCR generation well knows, each dub of a tape loses detail. Marzynski aims to minimize the comparable “generation loss” by documenting the testimony of the last living witnesses of the Holocaust.
