Canadian Premiere
Tethered to Polish folklore about the mysterious Kontrewers Stone, the ghost of a possessed girl and the filmmaker’s 102-year-old grandmother play out an imagined encounter. Nearing death, the pious and frail old woman has been mistaken for the ghost’s own mother. Though it borders on horror and the surreal, this is not a haunting but the beginning of a chosen maternal-filial, forming an unlikely tenderness across realms.
Conjuring memorable images once again, director Zuza Banasińska (Grandmamauntsistercat, MODES 2024), redefines possession not as pathology or loss of control, but as a means of communication: a negotiation of boundaries between self and other, past and present, life and its ending. Blending archival, staged, and documentary materials, Kontrewers explores how buried wounds and memories resurface through matter, gestures, and the body, refusing to be ignored.
Barbara Ptaszyńska
Poland/Netherlands
2026
In Polish with English subtitles
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Credits & Director
Producer
Zuza Banasińska, Aleksandra Aleksander
Screenwriter
Zuza Banasińska, Violeta Paez Armando
Cinematography
Jakub Dylewski
Editor
Zuza Banasińska
Zuza Banasińska
Zuza Banasińska is an artist and filmmaker from Warsaw, based in Amsterdam. Working in documentary fiction, their films draw on archives and speculative narratives to explore how images shape inheritance, subjectivity, and power. Their work has screened internationally at festivals including the Berlinale, International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, and Visions du Réel. Their film Grandmamauntsistercat screened at over 100 festivals, received 14 awards including the Teddy Award at the 74th Berlinale, and was nominated for the European Film Award.
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