SILENT NIGHT / CICHA NOC

Christmas Eve. A village house in eastern Poland. Adam, a young economic migrant, suddenly turns up at traditional supper. Nobody in his large family suspects the true reason for his unexpected return to Poland.

„The drama played out in the screenplay of Silent Night was not inspired by either a newspaper article or a famous person’s life. It is a story which speaks of a world I know well, the world I grew up in. The world of my childhood and youth was north-east Poland and a village in the predominantly rural Podlasie region. I have always wanted to portray the communities living there. Where I come from, tradition and family are the values which bind the multigenerational community. I want to talk about that community objectively, without evaluating its members and their behaviour or assessing their decisions and choices. I aim to avoid any sense of agreeing or disagreeing with them. In the screenplay, I adopt the perspective of Adam, a young man who is planning to leave his birthplace for good. He is an economic emigrant who has resolved, by way of a conscious decision, to forge a different fate from that written into his family’s tradition of migration driven by economic need. He wants to break that pattern and intends to settle abroad and raise a family there.“

Piotr Domalewski