Humour that brings people together: the actor, director, and screenwriter Monika Anna Wojtyllo
Monika Wojtyllo did not come to acting; acting came to her: in 1977, she was born into a theatre family in Wrocław, her parents’ first and last child. Her mother, Aleksandra Kuźmińska, worked as a housewife and did some acting on the side. Her father, Ryszard Wojtyłło from Lwów (Lviv), was a full-time director, actor, and author. In 1944, his family had been driven out of Lwów to Baborów as part of the forced repatriation campaign. Later, they moved to a suburb of Wrocław. Monika Wojtyllo was just four years old when she first stood on the stage. Her politically active parents presented some of their plays as children’s entertainment in order to get around the censors with their politically critical content. Little Monika didn’t fully understand what she was saying in her role, but it made the audience laugh, and that made her feel good. She also remembers that she observed the audience through a hole in the curtain, watching them come in and take their seats. Some were unsure of themselves, others were silent. Above all, though, they were no more than strangers to each other. “After the performance, they were much more relaxed,” she says. “They had laughed, they had cried, they had felt seen and understood. And they had bonded with each other.” Even now, Monika Wojtyllo still sees this as the driving force in her work. She wants to help people overcome their loneliness, to remind them that they can be a community. “None of us knows where we come from,” she explains. “We are born from an unknown place and go somewhere or other when we die. In the short space of time that we have here, we should stick together instead of being blinded by power and excess.”
Monika Wojtyllo was not even six when her parents were “cordially” asked by the state security services whether they might like to travel abroad. The small family were given passports and one month to leave the country – on condition that they spoke to no-one about it. So it was that one night, the Wojtyłłos packed the 23 hp Fiat, their Maluch, with as much as they could fit in. And off they went. As Monika remembers, the baggage loaded onto the roof of the car was almost as high as the car itself. She also recalls that the car was so tightly packed that she had to leave one of her rubber boots there. No-one knew about their departure – not even the neighbours. The only person who must have guessed what was happening was her mother’s brother. The Wojtyłłos had transferred the rights to their 50-square-metre flat in a typical socialist Polish apartment block to him in order to prevent the state from snatching it away.
They needed to obtain the necessary papers to enable them to cross the Polish state border. These included a written invitation by Monika’s godfather, Manfred Paul, a teacher from Hamburg, whom her parents had met on holiday. It is likely that someone in government had helped a little with the process of releasing the documents needed to leave the country. Today, Monika Wojtyllo is still unsure of what strings were being pulled behind the scenes. However, as she herself says, she can remember a “horrifying” amount of detail about the escape itself. She can still recall that she wore a little red woollen bag around her neck that contained British pound notes, a ring that she had inherited, her first tooth and other similar items. These were not things that you took with you on a short visit. Her parents had explained to her that she was not allowed to be frisked at the East German border crossing. Instead, she should look sleepy and cute. They told her to hug her toy dog, Belfik, very tightly, and to make a bit of a fuss if the border guards tried to take him away from her. “It was probably the greatest role of my life,” she says in retrospect. The family still has the little bag and its contents in their possession today.
The original plan was to travel on to England, where an aunt lived. However, Manfred persuaded them to seek political asylum in Germany. Monika Wojtyllo remembers the period after their registration with the authorities in Hamburg in 1983 as being the most absurd in her whole life: “I probably have an obligation to make a film about our escape and what came afterwards. For all the refugees who are currently going through the same experience.”
In her eyes, it was a tough time that shaped her. Suddenly, her largely carefree, innocent childhood was a thing of the past. Since Monika of course learned German much faster than her parents, she had to translate, fill out application forms, and stand her ground with officials. Naturally, her parents were also not idle, and joined a loosely connected Polish theatre group. Under the direction of Ryszard Wojtyłło, this became the P.I.K.A. (Polska Inicjatywa Kulturalno-Artystyczna), a group that performed Polish cabaret which portrayed the problems faced by Polish emigrants in a humorous way. Monika didn’t just spend her days and nights in school or in the playground like the other children, but also backstage and under tables. It was at these tables that her parents sat with the other Poles. “They drank vodka and cried,” she remembers. “After all, every one of these actors, musicians, and artists missed their homeland.”
Later, her parents began working in film. Her father was given a fixed role in “Lindenstrasse” (a popular German TV soap opera – translator’s note), while her mother worked finding bit-part players for the Studio Hamburg production company. She worked on crime series that were often set in St. Pauli (a district of Hamburg with a gritty reputation – translator’s note). Monika Wojtyllo has a direct way with words: “At 14, I had already seen every brothel in Hamburg from the inside.” And ultimately, she was also given her first major roles, such as “a kidnapped Polish girl refugee who is to be sold as a prostitute”. She was told to speak with a particularly strong accent for the role. “That’s how things were in German TV at the time,” she explains.
After numerous work placements behind the camera, her higher school leaving exams, and a brief surge of interest in studying medicine, Monika Wojtyllo ended up in the place that has been her professional home ever since: the world of film. She studied film direction in Babelsberg (a major film production centre in Potsdam – translator’s note), but continued to act during this time. This enabled her to learn about both sides of the camera, which she considers an advantage: “As a director, I can feel a particular degree of empathy for the actors. I know what it feels like to give everything you have in front of the camera.”
She also began writing scripts at an early stage, following in the footsteps of her father in all the three major areas of theatre and film: author, director, and actor. On the subjects she uses as material, she says: “They’re just as bizarre as I am. We don’t really belong anywhere. I’ll probably spend the rest of my life split between Poland and Germany.” Wojtyllo’s favourite genres are satire and comedy. In her eyes, they’re dramas in different packaging. For her, they also include political subjects, which “don’t ring the big emotional bells,” but rather question what is happening from a different perspective and with humour. She likes to draw on a quote from Billy Wilder when it comes to her own approach: “If you have something important to say, dip it in a little bit of chocolate.” She is also inspired by Roman Polański, Andrzej Wajda, David Lynch, and Woody Allen. However, every so often, they are joined by others. “The things I admire keep changing”, she says, and finally also mentions the influence her father has had on her work. After his death in 2022, Ryszard Wojtyllo left hundreds of unsorted works in Polish behind. “There really are a few wonderful things in there,” she says, and hopes that in the near future, she will be able to find a researcher who would be interested in taking on this mountain of plays.
To date, Monika Wojtyllo has acted in a large number of films, series and TV plays, including several episodes of “Tatort” (a popular, long-running crime fiction programme – translator’s note) and the high-end, award-winning crime series “Im Angesicht des Verbrechens” by Dominik Graf. Usually, she can be seen in smaller roles, such as the Minister for Education in “Die geschützten Männer” (2024) or as Daniela in the Netflix Original film “Betonrausch” (2019). She played bigger roles as Agnieszka Gutek in the tragicomedy “Global Player – Wo wir sind isch vorne” (2013) or as “Schwester Irina” in the first series of “Doktor Ballouz” (since 2021).
In addition to her own films, for which she also wrote the script, her work also includes short films and music videos, as well as the full-length film “Polska Love Serenade” (2008), which also stars her father. The comedy, which is set over the Christmas period, takes Polish clichés about Germans and German prejudices against Poles to the extreme and portrays a comical, warm-hearted rapprochement between the two cultures, personified by two of the characters, Anna from Germany and Max from Poland.
From the outside, all you see is the finished film. You don’t witness the amount of work that goes into making it. People who don’t work in the film industry find it particularly hard to imagine how many script versions and unfinished projects get cast aside during the process. It takes many years to develop a film and to find producers for it. Often during that time, hardly any money is paid, or is only paid later on. The general public usually only gets to see the tip of the iceberg: the small number of successful directors who bring out a new cinema film every few years. But how many of them are women?
That’s why Monika Wojtyllo is also active in other areas. From 2012 to 2016, for example, she paired up with Hennink Stöve to head the Filmschlossfest film festival in Schloss Beesenstedt palace, and has been a member of both the Grimme Prize committee and the Fritz Gerlich Prize committee.
Currently, one of the projects she is working on is the creation of a large film industry event during the Berlinale. The aim of the BERLINALE FILM HOSPITAL is to bring all film associations under one roof and over three or four days to exchange knowledge, create networks and, in the middle of the crisis in the film industry, to regain a sense of the light-heartedness that inspires creativity. Monika Wojtyllo puts it bluntly: “Since our industry is completely broke, I’m still looking for sponsors from other fields. My general motto is: we’re sexy and offer content and famous stars; you bring the money to pay for them and can party with us. And yes, that’s a call for applications! You’re welcome to contact us via the editor’s office!”
That aside, Monika Wojtyllo is also busy with a new film project: a psychological thriller about cancel culture with just one character, who slowly descends into madness in his apartment. “Even so,” she says, “knowing me, the film will be funny anyway. Humour is and always will be the best way to beat depression.”
According to Monika Wojtyllo, there is certainly reason to feel depressed, or at least concerned. She not only worries about the precarious situation in which the German film industry finds itself, but also the anti-democratic tendencies in many countries in Europe. With regard to Poland, she says: “I admire the spirit of this country, which has been kicked and trampled on from all sides, and which is now rising like a phoenix out of the ashes as one of the last democratic bastions of Europe.” She doesn’t travel regularly to her homeland. She’d like to spend more time there, but she’s also happy living where she is now, in Berlin-Kreuzberg. For her taste, it could be slightly more beautiful and peaceful, but she enjoys the multicultural environment and the open-mindedness of the people who live there. For a long time now, she has spoken better German than Polish, and regards herself as being very assimilated. However, she adds, laughing: “Only my soul is not up for grabs!” When it comes to German-Polish relations, she has the impression that Germany is almost entirely unaware of what is happening in Poland. In her eyes, in light of the “madness going on in Ukraine,” Poland is Germany’s most important neighbour. Not only that, but it’s also a country that has largely been able to rid itself of a reactionary party. In this regard, Germany could learn from Poland. Finally, Monika Wojtyllo explains the change in her surname from Wojtyłło to Wojtyllo: “I’ve no idea when it happened,” she says. “Probably in some office or other during the application process for citizenship, because the official couldn’t find the special symbol on the keyboard. Probably my parents thought that this was how it should be spelled, since that was how it was written. Otherwise, our identity hasn’t changed much. The fact is that I’m stuck in a memory of Poland anno domini 1985. My parents have successfully preserved the romantic aura of rebellion.”
Anselm Neft, January 2025
The artist online: https://www.monikawojtyllo.com/
