A delightful and gently profound meditation on the deep-rooted relationship between nature and humanity, Zuzanna Solakiewicz’s beautiful and gentle film resonates with sound, music, voices and history. The film’s full title perhaps says it all: ‘The Soil. A Documentary Musical.’
This feminist documentary follows ethnographer, researcher and singer Ewa Grochowska as she delves into remote Polish rural communities. But while her research into history and tradition is at the core of the film, it is the singing that is its vibrant heartbeat.
Ewa’s journey guides the audience through that pastoral world, with the camera constantly flitting between images of the changing rural landscape, often depicting it in the distance as something beautiful, perhaps impossible to tame. The structure of the film means that images and song are designed to entwine – it is a simple tool in some ways, but also deeply appropriate within the film’s context.
From the snow-capped fields and farm animals through to summer fields and wildlife, the film balances its elegant imagery with striking footage of women singing together. Their folk songs are part of an important rural tradition which often expresses their connection with nature and its changing seasons.
In these songs, they express the importance of history and nature, and during a ‘capping’ ceremony for a young bride the older women prepare her for the transition from maidenhood to the responsibilities as a lady of the house. They sing and place a garland of flowers on her head, with the song providing a link between past and present – in essence a living tradition emerges.
The music is raw, authentic, and devoid of any modern embellishments – old women (who are the custodians of the tradition) sing alongside young (who will take up the mantle) with songs and lyrics that provide a narrative structure for the film. These rural women reminisce about a potato harvest; examining how working in the fields changed their hands or explaining how city people feel alien to them.
The music and sounds of agricultural machines, the kneading of bread dough, the wind blowing in the grain, the soil, the crops, poultry and wild birds all merge with the images, continually accompanied by the voices of singing women. When there is a song relating to cuckoos them there is the sound of birdsong and a cuckoo’s call.
As one of the woman comments: “Birds in folk songs often symbolise souls of dead relatives who’ve come to visit. A journey of the soul.” The importance of mythology and tradition runs through the film along with the protagonists’ unyielding attachment to their folk culture.
Poland, 2021, 71mins
Dir Zuzanna Solakiewicz
Producer Anna Gawlita
Production Kijora Film, Endorfina Studio, Telewizja Polska
Screenplay Zuzanna Solakiewicz, Svika Gregory Portnoy
Cinematography Zvika Portnoy
Editor Zuzanna Solakiewicz
With Ewa Grochowska
