Thursday, 6 July | 8PM

Presented in collaboration with Chris Boekmann of True/False Film Festival

Image: Two Lessons, Wojciech Staroń, 114 minutes 1998-2013

// $5 – $10 sliding scale | FREE for kids and teens //

In 1996, Wojciech Staroń documented Malgosia, his girlfriend, as she traveled the Siberian city Usolie-Sibirskoe and gave Polish language lessons to the descendants of exiled Poles. Captured on beautiful 16mm film, “Siberian Lesson” is the candid, beautiful diary of a young teacher acclimating to a new environment and falling in love, as well as a portrait of a community still reeling from the collapse of the Soviet Union.


Many years after their Siberian journey, now a married couple with two children, Wojciech and Malgosia traveled to a very different place: Azara, a remote village in northern Argentina, where Malgosia once again taught Polish to fellow emigrants. In the gorgeous, startlingly intimate “Argentinian Lesson,” Wojciech also turns his 16mm camera on Janek, his 8-year-old son, and the boy’s young friend Marcia, a bright Argentinean girl of Polish descent bravely contending with poverty.

Wojciech Staroń was born in 1973 in Poland. He graduated from the Polish Film Academy in Łódź as a cinematographer in 1996. Staroń has photographed over 20 films. In 2011, he received the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Achievement at the 61st Berlinale for his camera work in Paula Markovitch’s feature film, The Prize.

The Basilica Non-Fiction Screening Series celebrates and interrogates the documentary genre through screenings and dialogue with visiting directors. The series is produced in collaboration with Chris Boeckmann, film programmer for the Columbia, MO-based True/False Film Fest, a pioneering film festival dedicated to exploring creative nonfiction film.

The series will form part of Basilica’s long-standing film program, which is now in its sixth year and continues to present an array of works from new and repertory narrative features, documentaries, experimental films, to video and media art, often with filmmakers and special guests in attendance for a discussion following the screenings.

Read more about the Basilica Non-fiction Screening Series here.