„W trosce o bagna” (Taking Care of the Marshes ) – Bożena and Jan Walencik

In fact, this production constitutes a film ballad about nature and people closely associated with it, about inevitable evanescence and eventually about human longing. The complex form of this story can be felt from its very first minutes. It is in the ballad that the three literary elements meet: epic, drama and lyric.

The epic is represented by reading and informational elements – in other words, objective knowledge about the nature of the Upper Biebrza Valley and about the project of shrub removal. These are intertwined with phrases from the local inhabitants and their truly reflective memories (from behind the scenes) of a past difficult life alongside nature and the pristine and abundant world of the marshy birds, elks, insects and plants. The longing for the lost nature, and also a hope for its restoration, manifests itself in the footage of the black grouse mating ground, at the beginning and the end of the film. These birds, once abundant also in the Upper Biebrza Valley, have become a symbol of the past glory of the Biebrza Marshes.

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