Director Kasia Adamik is no stranger to the screen, as her career began back in 2002. As a Polish filmmaker and storyboard artist, “Winter of the Crow” is an adaptation very close to home, and her personal experiences growing up as a European immigrant.

The film follows a British professor who witnesses a murder by secret police in 1981 Warsaw, Poland, under martial law. She becomes a target, and is forced to go on the run, and also forced to make a decision about whether or not to take a stand.

With an electric performance from Lesley Manville, the film takes standard film noir genre conventions and turn them on their head, while also exploring a tumultuous time in European history.

Cinema Femme sat down with director Adamik to talk about her experience making in the film.

So this story is an adaptation. Were you familiar with the work it’s based on? Furthermore, what attracted you to directing this project?

Yes, of course. I actually read the book, it’s a very short novel. It’s a short story that is a part of a book called Playing On Many Drums, I think, in English. And I read it many years before I wanted to adapt it. It was something that always felt very personal to me.

First of all, I know pretty well the literature of Olga Tokarczu, but this short number particularly rang very personal to me because she talks about a period, a very precise period in Polish history that I remember from my childhood. In 91, I was nine years old and martial law was installed, then I immigrated to France a few months later. And this moment in history, this moment in my life became very exacerbated, very big. And with the memory of a child, this came back in my dreams over the years while I was in Paris. And this visual, this kind of atmosphere, Olga Tokarczu managed to write in this very short story.

Sometimes with great literature, somebody writes better what you feel that you would be able to say yourself. So I wanted to put in this story my memories at the time. So this gray, depressing satellite town with these buildings, with this no-mans-land all around, it’s almost post-apocalyptic as a vision and maybe not completely realistic, but very real to me, to my memories. So this is what attracted me the most, this visceral feeling of this moment and the kind of absurdity that comes with the territory.

And it’s later when we started to work on the script with Sandra Buchta that we decided to put this kind of a spy story on the top of it, which is not in the book, not really. I mean, it is somehow in the book, but it’s seven pages long, so you cannot have too many details. And to try to exactly get this feeling of how does it feel to be in a totalitarian regime? How does it feel? Not how it happens, not what it means, but how it feels. That was what really interested me.

As you mentioned, you’re an immigrant yourself. How does this film reflect your experience as an immigrant? Did that experience influence your creative choices at all?

Well, I think a lot. I never analyzed it so much, but I think everything that I am is somehow influenced by the experience of being an immigrant. Maybe it opens up, maybe it gives you a little more empathy towards the different sides of the story. I have this big empathy towards the characters even if they’re on the wrong side of history. And obviously I was modeled by Polish cinema as much as American cinema and French cinema. So it gives you richness of perspective, I think. And also I think in this story as well, because it’s a simple story of escape, but it has a very complex background. It gives you the experience of the east and the west, of both sides of the aisle a little bit. And I think this difference, even though we are years after the country fell, we still have a very different experience of the 20th century of what it means to be European, for example, or this difference is very much built by what side of the country we were raised.

And having experienced both sides I think gives you interesting insight into that story. And I think this movie is a little bit about that as well. It’s about the different experiences of the 20th century of Europe especially, and maybe the lack of comprehension of both sides. Even though we live on the same continent, in the same world, we do not understand each other’s experience. And I think maybe having experience both helps me with that.

What was the filming process like for this? Where did you film? Were there any location based challenges you faced when filming?

Every location was a challenge. First of all, Warsaw 1981 doesn’t exist anymore. It is a period piece. It is completely built from scratch. And one of the biggest challenge, especially for the production designer, which is a brilliant, brilliant woman, was to recreate a big part of this universe in Luxembourg where we had to shoot big part of the story, of course, because of budget and co-productions. And it’s very hard to do a period European film without co-productions in several countries. And we had to shoot a big part of the film in Luxembourg, and that meant recreating Warsaw 1981 in Luxembourg, which doesn’t look anything like Warsaw 1981. I mean, it doesn’t look like anything like Warsaw now, but I think maybe also that gave us a little bit of freedom.

I wanted this world to feel hyper-realistic, not realistic, so make everything a little bigger or grayer or more expressive. And having to build everything gave us this freedom to go a little bit away from this just pure, normal, realistic documentary style, realistic storytelling. And we had a little bit more freedom because of it, and we had to bring everything from Poland. So that was a big challenge. And obviously winter was a big challenge because that year didn’t snow so much as we wanted it to snow. So we had to cheat a lot. But exactly, maybe it gave us a push towards the dreamlike universe that we tried to create. Yeah.

Lesley Manville is electric in this film. What was the casting process like for that role? How did you find Lesley?

We just made the list and prayed that she said she would say yes. That’s how it looked like. I had a chance to… I was asked to make a dream list, a dream list of actresses that I would see in the role. And obviously Lesley was on the very top of that list. And by the time we were ready to go to production, she was unavailable. But fortunately, because of our big production problems, we got postponed and postponed and postponed. And when we finally were ready to shoot, she was available and willing to read. And I think as sometimes it happens, little miracles happen, she liked the script and we had a really nice meeting and she said yes. And it’s very interesting to me how you can imagine this film with somebody else. I cannot anymore. But when you’re thinking about roles, you imagine different people, and every time it’ll be a completely different film

She brings so much of her energy and her personality into this film that I cannot imagine it with anybody else now. And for the Polish cast, obviously we had some Polish cast. We had also Luxembourg actors, and I wanted to just surround myself with people I know and worked with before, and I can trust into helping me in this difficult production process.

You’ve talked a bit about how you played with genre conventions by making the protagonist a deep, complicated, female character. Can you talk a bit more about that choice?

Yeah, because it’s actually very interesting experience with it because the novel itself has a male protagonist, and we did write a first version of the script with the male protagonist, and something didn’t click, and I don’t even know what it is. And we decided to do this experiment and to switch the sex of the characters without changing anything else. And I think that was actually a very interesting thing to do because it gave the story exactly what it liked. It means it gave, first of all, it gave a genre film noir, having not a guy in a trench coat, but a woman, which was an interesting thing. But also it gave her more fragility, like a physical fragility that this story I think needed. Fighting for survival becomes much more heartfelt. And also when I thought about it, she being from Great Britain, and she at the time in the 80s embodied this imperialist that comes into Eastern Europe and thinks they’re coming into some third world country, this imperialism had the face of Margaret Thatcher at the time.

She was this kind of embodiment of the West. And I thought it was interesting to play with that as well and to play with the relationship that the main character has with the other women in the story that became much more ambiguous. And when it was a man, the relationship with her student was very straightforward. I mean, it was a romantic relationship, and it still is because why not? But it’s not so obvious. It has the different shades of a relationship happening. And so it just became much more ambiguous. I also like the fact, having this being a woman, that she’s a kind of harsh person. She’s egocentric. The movie is about finding compassion towards strangers, strangers which are over the border. And this empathy that she finds is of course a very interesting journey, and I think maybe the message of the film, but for most part of the film, she’s very unpleasant.

And I think somehow I forgive her more, this harshness, because being a woman, I understand what she had to give of herself to be where she is, to be in the position where she is in her life, being a professor in this male dominated world of especially psychiatry and in England at the time. So it gives her a lot of shade, which maybe a male protagonist wouldn’t have. And so we read the script and we were like, wow, somehow everything that was kind of not working worked and it was such a simple thing to do. So that was interesting. I recommend it to everybody, write scripts not thinking about the gender of the main character, just write a character. So that worked really well.

At Cinema Femme we highlight female and gender expansive creatives. What has your journey been like as a female filmmaker?

Yeah, it’s a difficult question because I don’t know how it would have been if I was not a female filmmaker. I have nothing to compare it really. And also a lot of people in my family are filmmakers. Everybody’s in the film business. I have a very strong mother who is a director, a very successful director, and an aunt and a few other people, and a very strong and strong-minded grandmother. And so I was raised by very strong female figures, and I never, very rarely maybe, maybe once on a commercial, I never felt that me being a woman is a handicap.

I always felt that it’s just normal. People often ask me what about my female point of view? And I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what a female point of view is. I can only say what my point of view is, comes from my personal experience and from my journey, but I have no idea if it’s female or Eastern European or French. It’s just a mix of everything. And so it’s always difficult. I actually did a lot of other things which are very male dominated worlds because I studied comic books, which it was only guys in my class. And then I did storyboards, which is mostly guys also, and did directing, which I worked with a lot of big groups of men, and I never felt that we didn’t understand each other. We tell stories about human emotions. So I can’t really answer that question.

No, that was a great answer. I think it does have a lot of nuance to where we wouldn’t know the difference.

I would have to experience the male side to be able to compare myself to… I know that it is still more difficult in some jobs for women, but I never experienced it myself

What do you hope audiences take away from this film?

Yeah, I think I touch upon it. I think it’s about empathy for me. It’s about empathy, and especially in our days now where we need it more than ever. I think the only thing that can save the world and humanity is trying to feel for the other, even if it’s not just your neighborhood, not just your family, but whatever happens at the border or in another continent. I think we need to think about each other as human beings. And it’s not like Elon Musk said, I think it was the biggest problem with our world that is empathy. I think it’s the other way around. I think it’s our only hope. But I’m not an optimist. I’m a realist, so the film doesn’t really answer the question that can an experience like this change you forever? Is it just things change us for little bits, little moments.

We can get really sad even reading a story on the internet and then forget about it the next day or the next hour. But what can we do to not forget this experiences, not forget the other people? I don’t have an answer for that, but I think maybe that’s the way to go.

Lastly, you had a festival premiere for this film. What has it been like to take it on the festival circuit?

Yeah, I think it’s actually great. We were lucky enough to take the movie to a few festivals. We were in Toronto last year and San Sebastian and Rome and a couple of Polish-based festivals as well, which was maybe even more stressful because of what we’re showing in the film. People have a much more personal memory of that time in Poland, and the response was great. And I think what was the most exciting for me, except of course good reviews, which is always good for the film, was the reaction of younger audiences. I remember this one young girl, I think maybe 20 years old in Toronto coming from a Polish background say that she heard so much about this martial law and this communism. It was always very cold information and it was a bit boring. And this movie gave her exactly the emotional key to understand what her parents went through, which I thought was great.

So I’ve been really, really, really, really great that exactly, especially in our times when we sneak a little bit back towards totalitarism all over the world to just remember, because we forget, we forget. As people, we forget. We tend to forget very easily to remind the audiences what it feels like to not be able to have control over your own life, to not have control over your decisions, to lose this freedom, which is such a fragile thing.

“Winter of the Crow” is in theatres now.