At the Venice Film Festival, Nataliia Serebriakova spoke with Australian-based Polish filmmaker Kuba Dorabialski about his debut feature Agata the Writer, which premiered in the Giornate degli Autori competition. Starring Mia Wasikowska as a Polish-Australian writer who travels from Sydney to Sarajevo to work on a novel about the Bosnian War, the film quietly turns into a provocative reflection on the ethics of storytelling: what does it mean to write about a history you did not experience, and where is the line between empathy and appropriation?

Moving between comedy, drama, mystery, experimental cinema and literature, Agata the Writer follows its protagonist as the reality she encounters in Sarajevo gradually challenges her assumptions about the war and her own role as an author. In our conversation, Dorabialski discusses his fascination with literature, the cultural distance between Poland and the former Yugoslavia, his visual approach to filmmaking, and how he learned to direct Mia Wasikowska — the first professional actor he had ever worked with.

NS: You mentioned in your director’s statement that you were interested in the figure of the writer, somewhere between art, filmmaking and literature. What does literature mean to you personally?

KB: Literature was my first love as a teenager. My mother is very much a literary person, and she always made me read. As I got older, cinema and visual art became more of my language, but this spectre of literature kept hanging around. My video-art practice has always, in one way or another, engaged with the idea of the writer.

I think literature, and the process of writing in particular, is so internal and intimate for the creator. The relationship between a writer and a reader is also incredibly intimate and almost solitary. So it becomes an interesting challenge to try to communicate that visually — to show a character writing a novel, or to explore how language creates atmosphere, character and story simply through listening to words. There’s a nice tension between what cinema can do and what literature can do, and between the ways they might overlap.

NS: Why did you want to tell a story connected to the Bosnian War?

KB: I was born in Poland and grew up in Australia. From a distance of 10,000 kilometres, something interesting happens: there is a kind of unification of the Slavic countries. They start to seem quite similar because there isn’t a very large Polish diaspora in Australia. My best friend in high school was Croatian, and we would speak our own languages to each other. If my parents wanted to buy some Polish food, they might go to a Russian or Bulgarian shop.

So there was this funny process in which different Slavic cultures became quite close, but as soon as I travelled back to Eastern Europe, a lot of that dissolved. There’s still this strange feeling that I don’t feel Australian in Australia, but I also don’t feel Eastern European in Eastern Europe. The story in the film is partly based on one of my earlier video works, in which I travelled to some of the former Yugoslav states. I could understand fragments of the languages, and there was a lot that felt familiar, but there was also this enormous rift.

I wanted to explore that through the Polish-Australian character in the film. She arrives in Bosnia and Herzegovina thinking, “This is kind of similar. I have some sort of entry point into understanding this culture.” But once she gets there, she realises she has no real historical or cultural connection to the place. The differences are much greater than she naively imagined from Australia.

NS: Do you think Eastern European countries today are more divided by their different histories and cultures, or do they still share a sense of connection?

KB: Right now, I feel that since 1989, 1991 and then the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, there has been a conscious attempt to distinguish the various Eastern European nation-states from one another. There has been a deliberate process of separation. But beyond that, there’s also this Polish cultural complex around the idea that Poland isn’t actually Eastern Europe — that it’s Central Europe. Every Pole will show you a map and point to the exact centre between Moscow and Paris. Poland is right in the middle, so it can’t possibly be Eastern Europe.

But I think every process of self-identification requires you to consider how the outside world sees you. The fact that the Anglosphere and Western Europe have a cultural and historical understanding of Poland as Eastern European isn’t something that can simply be dismissed. I find it telling that Poles, as well as Czechs and Hungarians, sometimes want to distance themselves from the idea of Eastern Europe, as though it were something negative or something they shouldn’t be associated with. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, but I think there’s something interesting in that impulse.

NS: How did you manage to cast Mia Wasikowska? She is such a major international star.

KB: She lives in Sydney, and her brother is an artist whom I knew. Mia and her brother came to see one of my video works, and by that point I had already started writing the screenplay with this fantasy idea that perhaps she could play the character. When she came, I asked if she would be interested in reading the screenplay, and she said yes. The producer, Alex White, also knew me through the art world and knew Mia, so he helped make that connection happen. It came together quite easily, and I felt that was a good sign.

NS: She was essentially the first professional actor you had worked with. Was it intimidating to direct such an experienced performer?

KB: She was indeed the first in that regard. Before that, I had mainly worked with non-actors and amateurs, so I was definitely quite nervous. But she was incredibly generous. At one point, I had a bit of a collapse and said, “I don’t know if I can do the idea and your performance justice.” She was very gentle and, in a way, taught me without directly teaching me. She showed me what was a good way to give notes and how to work with another actor. That made me feel safe, and it created a really good environment. It was a beautiful way to learn how to direct — essentially being taught by a very gifted actor.

NS: The premise — a Western woman travelling to Eastern Europe to investigate the legacy of war — reminded me of Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, where two American cousins travel to Poland and confront the history of the Holocaust. Did you see any parallels between the two films?

KB: I haven’t seen the film, but I remember reading about it while we were working on Agata the Writer and thinking there were some interesting parallels. From what I understand, there are similarities in the way the characters gradually realise the limits of their own understanding. They have a connection to the place, but it’s also quite distant. At some point, history points towards an individual and a personal story, but that individual can never completely transcend the wider historical reality. I think that’s where the similarities lie.

NS: The film has a very distinctive, experimental visual language, particularly the long speech towards the end. How did you develop that visual approach?

KB: That’s a good question. I teach cinematography and moving-image history at a university in Sydney, and I’ve grown up with cinema culture. So the visual is usually my starting point when I work on a project. I tend to have a sense of what I want something to look like first, and then the script or the idea develops from there. There’s also this lovely process of bringing together what I had imagined with the actual reality of filming — and with all the realities and limitations of the filmmaking process.