Call Me Marianna

director: Karolina Bielawska

original title: Mów mi Marianna

country: Poland

year: 2015

running time: 75 min.

synopsis

At the center of this film stands an attractive forty-year-old woman who has decided to fulfill a lifelong dream at the cost of great sacrifice - to be herself. She alienated her parents and lost loved ones when she underwent a long-desired sex change. The film attempts to explain to viewers and help them understand the difficult decision that Marianna had to face. While in the first, staged, part of the film the woman comes to terms with her own past through autobiographical theater performance, in the second, documentary part of the film, she is, however, confronted with unexpected twists and precarious situations that fate has set before her.

DETAIL:
“I’ll finally be able to look at myself in the mirror naked and not feel disgusted by my own body. – There are men and women. There’s male and female. The world doesn’t really allow any third options.”

biography

Polish documentary filmmaker Karolina Bielawska studied film editing at the Krzysztof Kieślowski Faculty of Radio and Television at the University of Silesia in Katowice. In Warsaw she attended a workshop at the Andrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing. She directed the mid-length project film Warsaw Available (2009) on social differences in contemporary Poland. Call Me Marianna is her feature-length debut.

more about film

director:	Karolina Bielawska
producer:	Zbigniew Domagalski, Barbara Paciorkowska
photography:	Kacper Czubak
editing:	Daniel Gąsiorowski
music:	Anthony and the Johnsons, Natalia Fiedorczuk
sound:	Jacek Pająk

back to listing