East of Paradise

East of Paradise is the last part of underground film maker Kowalski’s Wild Wild East trilogy. Following The Boot Factory and On Hitler’s Highway, his latest documentary is by far the most personal. In the first part of East of Paradise, he listens to Maria Werla Kowalski, his mother. With unusual precision and a natural feeling for language, she describes her transport from Krakow to the Soviet gulags at the beginning of the Second World War. Mrs Kowalski states that it is probably impossible for those who did not suffer the same fate to really comprehend this dark period from history. As if challenged by the depth and breadth of the horror and tragedy to which his mother was exposed, son Kowalski then dives into his own gnarled past. Using images from his earlier work (Gringo, Walter and Cutie, D.O.A.), that contrast starkly in image quality with the sharper images of his mother, he shows the social ghettos of porn and drugs use. These are however only modestly comparable with the story of his mother. Where her account pays homage to the human power to survive the torture they were forced to undergo, the images of the son largely show a marginal existence he chose himself. It is this unbridgeable gap that makes joining two such different worlds into a controversial double portrait. (PvH)

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