A web of roots – The director Emilie Girardin
Emilie Girardin learnt Catalan in Barcelona, a language she says is still part of her everyday life today. Nonetheless, she also found the time to regularly visit her grandfather in Katowice and to spend the semester holidays in Berlin, where she worked as a waitress and went to the theatre. She adored the Berlin Volksbühne, the Schaubühne and the Berliner Ensemble and was fascinated by Castorf and Ostermeier. And she had the idea of doing an Erasmus exchange in Germany. “Of course” she wanted to go to the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin first, but it had no exchange programme with her university in Barcelona. But the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre did. After a semester there, Girardin decided to move to Germany for good and complete her studies in Hamburg.
Girardin’s interest in physical theatre didn’t wane in her new home. After graduating, however, she found the theatre industry to be self-centred and elitist, which led her to work extensively with forms of participatory theatre in an attempt to create a different relationship with the audience. Eventually, she became increasingly interested in film as a medium for self-expression. In 2018, during the Christmas season in Katowice, she came up with the idea of making a film about Silesia. The special history of this region became clear to Girardin when she worked with a choir of German displaced persons from the former eastern territories of the German Reich as an assistant director at Hamburg’s Kampnagel Theatre in 2017, an experience that led her to discover a new aspect of German-Polish history. She spoke to her mother and grandfather about the topic, did some research, asked questions and began shooting her first film in 2019: “The Last To Leave Are The Cranes”. This moving drama is about Nati, a young Chilean woman who travels to Poland to research her family history. There she meets her old friend Mo again and sets off with her on a road trip through Silesia, a journey that puts both her ideas about Europe and her friendship with Mo to the test.
Emilie Girardin fondly remembers the filming and the research that preceded it: “I visited many institutions for German-Polish cooperation in Silesia, got to know many fascinating historians, visited historical sites, and discovered a completely new side to Silesia.”
Over the course of her work in Silesia, Emilie Girardin found herself more deeply rooted in her mother’s homeland and made friends with whom she remains close. She says: “I love Silesia: the landscape, the colours, the architecture, the people. I love the open and supportive welcome I received during my research. I appreciate the unorthodox, inquisitive thinking of the people I know there.”
With the film, Emilie Girardin tried to approach her family history from a perspective that made it possible to narrate the pain of German-Polish history from a certain distance. She is particularly interested in the history of early 20th century Silesia: the (re)emergence of Poland and the simultaneous consolidation of nationalisms in a region characterised by multilingualism and multiculturalism.
Growing up between different cultures taught Girardin from an early age that origins are complex and cannot be reduced to one language, one name or one place. She says: “For me, origin is a web of emotional relationships with people in different places. This openness towards the world is fundamental to my work.”
