Third Fairy Tales Film Collection - "Borderland Tales"

The third part of the series of the Fairy Tales Film Collection (previously: The Fairy Tale Film Collection of Borderland Tales: Legends, Fables and Fairy Tales, Fairy Tales Film Collection - "Songs of Borderlands"), this time collects local tales of the oldest inhabitants of Sejny and its environs. Memories of the former neighbors culminated in the Fairy Tales Film Collection- "Borderland Tales."

The participants of the annual artistic adventures were children and young people from different ethnic backgrounds from Sejny and environs. The youngest participant was five years old the oldest eighteen.

Guardians of the new "filmmakers" and at the same time participants were the young people from the Sejny Chronicles studio who for three years have been participating in the film project. An important experience was the direct inclusion in the work of Sejny seniors, including those actively participating in the activities of the University of the Third Age in Sejny. Their memories, their voices form the narrative of our films.

The film, art and music workshops were run by eminent artists - Joanna Polak, Daria Kopiec, Wiesław Szumiński, Raphael Rogiński, Dominika Turowicz, Aleksander Kotarska, Urszula Wasilewska. The artistic supervisor of the whole project - as in previous editions - was Bożena Szroeder.

It is with great pleasure that we present to you something fresh and unique. It reflects not only the world of the future but is in itself the added value for the present, seeking its way towards the future. It is a great record of the journey that started with collecting stories from around Sejny and extended into the multi-stage effort of film making using the stop-motion technique.

The collected materials are a kind of an archive but also a source of identity we draw on while reading anew into meanings.

Borderland Foundation in this project deals with the revival of culture, both in terms of the chosen work technique, derived from the old school of animation, and based on the heritage context. The assembled stories develop in the form of galleries of characters, events and motives.

The animations do not over-interpret the collected stories, but translate them through film into images. The off camera voice becomes the teller and the picture becomes a listener. It is a narration with an image and listening with imagination. It is a mutual and never-ending relation.

It is a peculiar way of saving from oblivion. Peculiar persistence in time and space. An extension of duration.

Of course, behind the scenes, there is solid human effort, library queries, research, things that build the internal education of the project, involving the local community in active search for their roots by working with professional filmmakers, artists, animators and musicians. The finished product presented to you, however, can be easily referred to as external education. The key element of this project was not only the involvement of the local region and youth at all its stages, but permitting the connection between the young and adults, professionals and amateurs and launching into the world the fruit of their effort. Creation of a new value. These are small works of art, created with the hands and minds possessing poetic sensibility. Artistic ones, living in the tight corners of Sejny, linking the young and the old, the experienced and the inexperienced, connecting the past with what is to come. This combination can give a strong lesson to all of us, I hope.

Karolina Wesołowska

Acknowledgments: 

Our special thanks go to the citizens of Sejny who have shared with us the memories of their neighbourhood. We are particularly grateful to our “lectors” for their time and voices that gave the  sound of reality to our Sejny narratives. We would like to thank Janina Augustynowicz, Irena Karwowska, Weronika Sidorowicz, Zuzanna Sikorska, Jerzy Nazaruk and Ryszard Melon.

Our cordial thanks go to Zdzisław Dudek for his translation.