Fear and anxiety are primal and invasive, at times irrepressible, emotions. And like love, they can be rendered in rich cinematic terms, as evidenced in Hidden, selected for Krakow Polish Competition.
In the short film, Polish director Monika Kotecka presents these fundamental emotions in monochrome, moving between the mind/body and its internal mechanisms, to a natural biosphere of insects, woods and water, one that also contains buses and burning garbage, and then out into the cosmic world of eclipses and sun flares.
We hear testimonies of women across all generations who suffer anxiety, such as one for whom a potential cure serves merely to intensify the emotion. An earwig placed inside the ear may eat away at one’s fear, but it will also stay there, with all the sense of anxiety and revulsion that entails.
For another woman fear is felt in the belly, a reminder of sex. For another it is located in the throat beneath the trachea. Another will perform a million tasks to escape “this relentless fucking noise.” We hear of breathlessness, and we hear of nightmares, all deriving from a pervasive sense of anxiety. Fear can be breathed in and accepted, and then it may drift away. But it will inevitably return.
We are further told at the film’s end that 4.4% of the planet’s population suffers from severe anxiety, which is classified as the most prevalent mental health condition.
“I didn’t want to make Hidden an autobiographical film, but of course my own experiences were, let’s say, the important starting point,” director Kotecka tells Business Doc Europe. “But they also helped me to build trust and closeness in the conversations with other people, other women. But over time I realized that what interested me most was not only fear itself, but also how deeply universal it is.”
“Initially co-writer Beata Bartecka and I spoke with both men and women, but actually I noticed quite quickly that women spoke about fear with a different kind of openness and, let’s say, honesty,” she adds. The film is produced by Marta Szmanowska, “whose support and dedication have been essential throughout the entire process,” says Kotecka.
So is monochrome the colour of anxiety? The director ponders the question. “Well, to be honest, that was my initial idea, but later on I regret actually deciding to make it only black and white,” she responds. “In the archives of the Educational Film Studio in Łódź, which you can see mostly in the film, the most beautiful [images] were black and white. So I decided, okay, let’s make it black and white. But during the last round of post-production, I wanted to add some colours, but it was too late. So I think actually, no, fear is not only black and white. I think it’s got all the range of the colours.”
Making the film entailed a process of catharsis, Kotecka claims, and she changed fundamentally over the four years or so it was in production. “I’m not the Monika who started the film some time ago,” she says, underlining how she previously had a “stronger relationship” with anxiety. “To be honest, even though it premiered in March this year at Thessaloniki, I think that I had already closed that chapter, let’s say, almost half a year before the premiere.”
That said, the “vibration” that she experienced as a sufferer of anxiety fundamentally informed the style of the film that she embarked upon, and specifically the archive that she was sourcing.
“I became fascinated, not only with the content of those [archive] films, but also with the images themselves, the texture, the framing, the physicality of the 16-millimeter and 35-millimeter film, the grain and its imperfections, the bluntness of those visuals,” she says.
“Many of these were educational or scientific films, but they were created by filmmakers with incredibly artistic sensitivity,” she adds. “And I was especially drawn to images balancing between science and abstraction as you could see in the underwater worlds, biological structures, medical footage and plant films, and they stopped functioning as pure documentation and became almost dreamlike. So from the beginning I knew I didn’t want to use archives illustratively…I wanted images that carried emotional weight.”
Kotecka uses her own self-shot images as well, such as that of a very beautiful baby feeding from its mother’s breast. It is a scene which is open to interpretation, indicating a stage of life before anxiety is an issue or, as the director herself suggests, representative of a “condensation of inherited trauma.”
“It was important for me to develop a visual language that could genuinely co-exist with archives, and I care deeply about creating a coherent visual world where the archive footage and my own images could breathe together naturally and emotionally,” she says, underlining how this possible thanks to her collaboration with editor Mateusz Romaszkan. “It’s my intention also to give the viewer space to [apply] his or her own way of interpretation, and also use those images to confront with his or her own anxieties and personal stories.”
Water is also a recurrent motif within the film. “I think about images as carriers of emotions, memories and experience that exist deeper than the language itself. And water in the film often functions as a space of emotion, of subconscious transformation.”
Kotecka is looking beyond festival and regular theatrical distribution for her film, she tells BDE. “I can absolutely imagine Hidden existing beyond the cinema space and entering galleries, immersive installations and audiovisual environments. From the beginning, the project felt much more hybrid to me than a traditional documentary, closer to an emotional and sensory experience. That’s why working with composer Aleksandra Kotecka and Franciszek Kozłowski, the director of sound, became very important.”
She argues that their sonic contribution is as important, in its physicality and immersiveness, as the film’s visuals. “Actually now we are working on translating to galleries to make Hidden part of a broader process of deep listening process. Not only through music, but also through hearing yourself and how your body speaks to you,” Kotecka ends.
