Pologne-en-Québec
by Kinga Michalska and Sarah Chouinard-Poirier
3-channel video installation
48min loop, Canada, 2025
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Synopsis:
How can we live and work together despite precarity, exclusion, and exhaustion? How can we manage errors and conflicts, move beyond the logic of virtue, and sustain long term commitments?
Pologne-en-Québec is a video work co-created with a group of friends invited to participate in a role-play game of an unlikely cross-cultural alliance set in the world of an eerie but homy community with confused ethics. Through collaborative storytelling the actors formed and deformed alternative versions of themselves to bring to life a delirious utopia nicknamed “Pologne-en-Québec” : A failure by design.
Years later, the characters confide to the camera trying to make sense of their experiences. Through this narrative, the artists explore and purge their own anguished desire of queer rural life to discover the hidden defects growing back in the garden of good intentions.
CREDITS
With: Alegria Gobeil, Frédérique Chassé, Johnny Forever Nawracaj, Lari Jalbert, Mai Bach-Ngoc Nguyen, Marcela Szwarc, Michael Martini, Mycelium, naveed L. salek nejad
DOP: Kinga Michalska
Camera 2: & Baco Lepage-Acosta
Editing: Kinga Michalska
Additional editing: Jadis Dumas, Lucas Villegas, Paul Chotel
Puppets: Marcela Szwarc, Lari Jalbert
Set design: Lari Jalbert
Music: Gambletron
Sound design: Paloma Daris
Mix: Emilie Blaise
Colors: Marianne Lévesque
Production assistants: B. Brookbank, AM Trépanier
Post-production: Centre Prim
Produced with financial support of: Axeneo7, CALQ, CAC, CAM, Centre Prim
Photo documentation: vert soleil green sun, installation view, AXENEO7, 2025, Photo credit: Kinga Michalska and Sarah Chouinard-Poirier
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by Kinga Michalska and Sarah Chouinard-Poirier
3-channel video installation
48min loop, Canada, 2025
Synopsis:
How can we live and work together despite precarity, exclusion, and exhaustion? How can we manage errors and conflicts, move beyond the logic of virtue, and sustain long term commitments?
Pologne-en-Québec is a video work co-created with a group of friends invited to participate in a role-play game of an unlikely cross-cultural alliance set in the world of an eerie but homy community with confused ethics. Through collaborative storytelling the actors formed and deformed alternative versions of themselves to bring to life a delirious utopia nicknamed “Pologne-en-Québec” : A failure by design.
Years later, the characters confide to the camera trying to make sense of their experiences. Through this narrative, the artists explore and purge their own anguished desire of queer rural life to discover the hidden defects growing back in the garden of good intentions.
CREDITS
With: Alegria Gobeil, Frédérique Chassé, Johnny Forever Nawracaj, Lari Jalbert, Mai Bach-Ngoc Nguyen, Marcela Szwarc, Michael Martini, Mycelium, naveed L. salek nejad
DOP: Kinga Michalska
Camera 2: & Baco Lepage-Acosta
Editing: Kinga Michalska
Additional editing: Jadis Dumas, Lucas Villegas, Paul Chotel
Puppets: Marcela Szwarc, Lari Jalbert
Set design: Lari Jalbert
Music: Gambletron
Sound design: Paloma Daris
Mix: Emilie Blaise
Colors: Marianne Lévesque
Production assistants: B. Brookbank, AM Trépanier
Post-production: Centre Prim
Produced with financial support of: Axeneo7, CALQ, CAC, CAM, Centre Prim
Photo documentation: vert soleil green sun, installation view, AXENEO7, 2025, Photo credit: Kinga Michalska and Sarah Chouinard-Poirier
Wesele (Noches / The Wedding), Part II of Pologne-en-Québec
Video by Kinga Michalska and Sarah Chouinard-Poirier
25min, loop, Canada 2025
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Synopsis:
The Pologne-en-Québec theatre committee presents a makeshift adaptation of the Polish grand classic from a neo-romantic repertoire: “Wesele” by Stanisław Wyspiański (1901). The play stages a marriage between a peasant woman and a bourgeois man interrupted by visitors from another world. The author depicts the phenomenon of the peasantry craze: “chłopomania” - an intoxicating obsession with the village culture that he observed among his writer and artist friends. They were engaging in cross-class marriages with hopes to reconnect with “the authentic Polishness” they lost. They also believed that the “real people” from the country were more connected to Spirits and therefore had access to the supernatural powers necessary to carry out a revolution that the intellectuals were craving for but couldn’t conduct themselves.
In this video, the artists wink at themselves and their leftist communities for falling into a similar reverse acculturation phenomenon. The piece spins in circles of strange encounters where the obscure contours of the commune’s political aspirations are also being put to test. Opening the gates to hell, Wesele unleashes a catarctic cry-laughter that drags the viewer through a spiral of mistranslations and clowny cultural mutations under which the necessity of community - despite its flaws - remains critical.
CREDITS
With: Alegria Gobeil, Frédérique Chassé, Johnny Forever Nawracaj, Lari Jalbert, Mai Bach-Ngoc Nguyen, Marcela Szwarc, Mycelium, naveed L. salek nejad
DOP: Kinga Michalska
Camera 2: Baco Lepage-Acosta
Editing: Kinga Michalska
Additional editing: Jadis Dumas, Lucas Villegas, Paul Chotel
Puppets: Marcela Szwarc, Lari Jalbert
Set design: Lari Jalbert
Music: Gambletron
Sound design: Paloma Daris
Sound on set: Camille Gravel
Mix: Emilie Blaise
Colors: Marianne Lévesque
Production assistants: B. Brookbank, AM Trépanier, Frédérique Laliberté
Post-production: Centre Prim
Produced with financial support of: Axeneo7, CALQ, CAC, CAM, Centre Prim
Photo documentation: vert soleil green sun, installation view, AXENEO7, 2025, Photo credit: Kinga Michalska![]()
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Video by Kinga Michalska and Sarah Chouinard-Poirier
25min, loop, Canada 2025
Synopsis:
The Pologne-en-Québec theatre committee presents a makeshift adaptation of the Polish grand classic from a neo-romantic repertoire: “Wesele” by Stanisław Wyspiański (1901). The play stages a marriage between a peasant woman and a bourgeois man interrupted by visitors from another world. The author depicts the phenomenon of the peasantry craze: “chłopomania” - an intoxicating obsession with the village culture that he observed among his writer and artist friends. They were engaging in cross-class marriages with hopes to reconnect with “the authentic Polishness” they lost. They also believed that the “real people” from the country were more connected to Spirits and therefore had access to the supernatural powers necessary to carry out a revolution that the intellectuals were craving for but couldn’t conduct themselves.
In this video, the artists wink at themselves and their leftist communities for falling into a similar reverse acculturation phenomenon. The piece spins in circles of strange encounters where the obscure contours of the commune’s political aspirations are also being put to test. Opening the gates to hell, Wesele unleashes a catarctic cry-laughter that drags the viewer through a spiral of mistranslations and clowny cultural mutations under which the necessity of community - despite its flaws - remains critical.
CREDITS
With: Alegria Gobeil, Frédérique Chassé, Johnny Forever Nawracaj, Lari Jalbert, Mai Bach-Ngoc Nguyen, Marcela Szwarc, Mycelium, naveed L. salek nejad
DOP: Kinga Michalska
Camera 2: Baco Lepage-Acosta
Editing: Kinga Michalska
Additional editing: Jadis Dumas, Lucas Villegas, Paul Chotel
Puppets: Marcela Szwarc, Lari Jalbert
Set design: Lari Jalbert
Music: Gambletron
Sound design: Paloma Daris
Sound on set: Camille Gravel
Mix: Emilie Blaise
Colors: Marianne Lévesque
Production assistants: B. Brookbank, AM Trépanier, Frédérique Laliberté
Post-production: Centre Prim
Produced with financial support of: Axeneo7, CALQ, CAC, CAM, Centre Prim
Photo documentation: vert soleil green sun, installation view, AXENEO7, 2025, Photo credit: Kinga Michalska
Vampires, It’s Nothing To Laugh At
Film by Kinga Michalska
36min, Documentary, Canada, 2023
World premiere: Visions du Réel
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/1056776869
Watch online worldwide: https://dafilms.com/film/18361-vampires-it-s-nothing-to-laugh-at
Watch online in Canada: https://www.tenk.ca/en/documentaires/essay/vampires-its-nothing-to-laugh-at
Synopsis:
In the 1960s, an anthropologist thinks he has discovered the existence of a vampire woman in a Kashub community in Wilno, Ontario. Kinga Michalska returns to the village still recovering from the trauma of this coverage, using a skillful blend of archival footage and performance to question the relationship between lived reality and scientific "truth". The film is a critical reflection on how we tell stories of others and asks who is the real vampire - the scientist, the audience, the tourists, the community or the filmmaker themself?
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Screening history
2023 Visions du Réel, International Film Festival, International Medium Length Film Competition - Special Mention, Nyon, Switzerland (World Premiere)
2023 Short Waves Film Festival, International Competition, Poznan, Poland
2023 Festival De Nouveau Cinéma, National Short Film Competition, Montréal, Canada
2023 DMZ DOCS International Documentary Film Festival, Goyang-si, South Korea
2023 30_____70 DOC FEST, Lago, Italy
2023 Muzeum Piśmiennictwa i Muzyki Kaszubsko-Pomorskiej w Wejherowie, Kaszubskie Wampiry, Kaszëbë
2024 InScience Film Festival, Nijmegen, Netherlands
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Film by Kinga Michalska
36min, Documentary, Canada, 2023
World premiere: Visions du Réel
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/1056776869
Watch online worldwide: https://dafilms.com/film/18361-vampires-it-s-nothing-to-laugh-at
Watch online in Canada: https://www.tenk.ca/en/documentaires/essay/vampires-its-nothing-to-laugh-at
Synopsis:
In the 1960s, an anthropologist thinks he has discovered the existence of a vampire woman in a Kashub community in Wilno, Ontario. Kinga Michalska returns to the village still recovering from the trauma of this coverage, using a skillful blend of archival footage and performance to question the relationship between lived reality and scientific "truth". The film is a critical reflection on how we tell stories of others and asks who is the real vampire - the scientist, the audience, the tourists, the community or the filmmaker themself?
Screening history
2023 Visions du Réel, International Film Festival, International Medium Length Film Competition - Special Mention, Nyon, Switzerland (World Premiere)
2023 Short Waves Film Festival, International Competition, Poznan, Poland
2023 Festival De Nouveau Cinéma, National Short Film Competition, Montréal, Canada
2023 DMZ DOCS International Documentary Film Festival, Goyang-si, South Korea
2023 30_____70 DOC FEST, Lago, Italy
2023 Muzeum Piśmiennictwa i Muzyki Kaszubsko-Pomorskiej w Wejherowie, Kaszubskie Wampiry, Kaszëbë
2024 InScience Film Festival, Nijmegen, Netherlands
Upiór and Guests
This 3-channel installation uses the figure of a Slavic vampire as a metaphor for migrant identity and otherness. The work explores the notions of truth and fiction by examining various tools and systems of power that seem to allow us to distinguish one from the other. The piece explores issues of colonialism, academic classism and ethics of representation. It tells a story of losing one’s identity and reinventing oneself anew.
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Discomfort of Evening, installation view, Zachęta National Gallery, curated by Magdalena Komornicka, Warsaw 2022, photo by Hanna Linkowska.
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Discomfort of Evening, installation view, Zachęta National Gallery, curated by Magdalena Komornicka, Warsaw 2022, photo by Tytus Szabelski.
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Discomfort of Evening, installation view, Zachęta National Gallery, curated by Magdalena Komornicka, Warsaw 2022, photo by Hanna Linkowska.
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Discomfort of Evening, installation view, Zachęta National Gallery, curated by Magdalena Komornicka, Warsaw 2022, photo by Hanna Linkowska.
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Installation View, Have You Ever Seen a Ghost?, DMZ DOCS Festival, Korea.
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Installation view, Upiór and Guests, Bande Video, Quebec, 2023.
This 3-channel installation uses the figure of a Slavic vampire as a metaphor for migrant identity and otherness. The work explores the notions of truth and fiction by examining various tools and systems of power that seem to allow us to distinguish one from the other. The piece explores issues of colonialism, academic classism and ethics of representation. It tells a story of losing one’s identity and reinventing oneself anew.
Discomfort of Evening, installation view, Zachęta National Gallery, curated by Magdalena Komornicka, Warsaw 2022, photo by Hanna Linkowska.
Discomfort of Evening, installation view, Zachęta National Gallery, curated by Magdalena Komornicka, Warsaw 2022, photo by Tytus Szabelski.
Discomfort of Evening, installation view, Zachęta National Gallery, curated by Magdalena Komornicka, Warsaw 2022, photo by Hanna Linkowska.
Discomfort of Evening, installation view, Zachęta National Gallery, curated by Magdalena Komornicka, Warsaw 2022, photo by Hanna Linkowska.
Installation View, Have You Ever Seen a Ghost?, DMZ DOCS Festival, Korea.
Installation view, Upiór and Guests, Bande Video, Quebec, 2023.Diary
Photographic series
2013-now
I started this series when I first arrived in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Having left Poland in part due to the political climat, I intuitively started documenting my life in a new place. Photography has been my tool for facilitating connections as I coutinue to cultivate a new queer community. A collection of video portraits and intimate photographs and writings, Diary is a queer meditation on home, love, and kinship. This work has been shown in gallery settings in Montreal, London, Warsaw, Kraków, and Poznań. In 2021, the series received an honorable mention at the TIFF Open competition at the Polish Photography Festival.
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Installation view “Poganki”, curated by Agnieszka Rayzacher, lokal_30, Warsaw 2021, phot. Marcin Liminowicz.
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Installation view “Poganki”, curated by Agnieszka Rayzacher, lokal_30, Warsaw 2021, phot. Marcin Liminowicz.
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Installation view “Poganki”, curated by Agnieszka Rayzacher, lokal_30, Warsaw 2021, phot. Marcin Liminowicz.
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Installation view, Queer Gaze from Poland:
Portrait of Love and Desire, curated by Grażyna Siedlecka, Bermondsay
Project Space, London, UK
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Winnie, Gen and Bean
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Sarah, Bear, Bunny, Small Phoque, Big Phoque and Bat.
Photographic series
2013-now
I started this series when I first arrived in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Having left Poland in part due to the political climat, I intuitively started documenting my life in a new place. Photography has been my tool for facilitating connections as I coutinue to cultivate a new queer community. A collection of video portraits and intimate photographs and writings, Diary is a queer meditation on home, love, and kinship. This work has been shown in gallery settings in Montreal, London, Warsaw, Kraków, and Poznań. In 2021, the series received an honorable mention at the TIFF Open competition at the Polish Photography Festival.
Installation view “Poganki”, curated by Agnieszka Rayzacher, lokal_30, Warsaw 2021, phot. Marcin Liminowicz.
Installation view “Poganki”, curated by Agnieszka Rayzacher, lokal_30, Warsaw 2021, phot. Marcin Liminowicz.
Installation view “Poganki”, curated by Agnieszka Rayzacher, lokal_30, Warsaw 2021, phot. Marcin Liminowicz.
Installation view, Queer Gaze from Poland:
Portrait of Love and Desire, curated by Grażyna Siedlecka, Bermondsay
Project Space, London, UK
Winnie, Gen and Bean
Sarah, Bear, Bunny, Small Phoque, Big Phoque and Bat. 
Navid
Carmen
George, Pomona and Eone
Mau
Guy and Jamaal
Sarah’s ferns
Crystal’s wig
Moe
Andy
Candi
Alice, Navid and Nima
Sarah Mo
Kinga
Parents
Naomi and Kai
Jordan Brown
Lactatia and Crystal
Eone
Jamaal
Winnie
E.
Kai and Naomi
10 Pine
Lari
Installation view “The Kitchen”, curated by Polana Institute, The
Clay, Warsaw Gallery Weekend, Warsaw 2020
Installation view, MFA Open Studios 2018
Installation view, MFA Open Studios 2018
Photo credit: B. Brookbank
Contact
Kinga Michalska (they/them)
kingamichalska@yahoo.com
ig @kinga.mi.666
I’m a Polish queer filmmaker and visual artist born in Łódź and currently based in Tiohtiá:ke/ Mooniyang/ Montreal. I use mediums of film, video installation and photography to examine shared cultural spaces such as home, kinship, land, memory and hauntings. I am interested in the periphery of what and who makes history: amateur historians, geological processes, personal archives, oral history and speculative fictions.
I hold an MFA in Photography from Concordia University and a BA in Cultural Studies from the University of Warsaw. My work has been presented in many festivals and exhibitions around the world including Canada, Poland, South Korea, UK, Switzerland, France, Italy, Netherlands and Germany.
My debut feature documentary BEDROCK had its premiere at Berlinale FF 2025. It recently won the award for Best Polish Film at Millennium Docs Against Gravity FF in Poland.
Kinga Michalska (they/them)
kingamichalska@yahoo.com
ig @kinga.mi.666
I’m a Polish queer filmmaker and visual artist born in Łódź and currently based in Tiohtiá:ke/ Mooniyang/ Montreal. I use mediums of film, video installation and photography to examine shared cultural spaces such as home, kinship, land, memory and hauntings. I am interested in the periphery of what and who makes history: amateur historians, geological processes, personal archives, oral history and speculative fictions.
I hold an MFA in Photography from Concordia University and a BA in Cultural Studies from the University of Warsaw. My work has been presented in many festivals and exhibitions around the world including Canada, Poland, South Korea, UK, Switzerland, France, Italy, Netherlands and Germany.
My debut feature documentary BEDROCK had its premiere at Berlinale FF 2025. It recently won the award for Best Polish Film at Millennium Docs Against Gravity FF in Poland.