Reflections

The discussion following the screening of Letters from Wolf Street unfolded in a warm and attentive atmosphere. The room seemed to mirror the film’s tone, which was reflective, curious, and touched by a sense of vulnerability. Mirko Winkler opened the discussion by welcoming and introducing the director Arjun Talwar, the editor and co-writer Bigna Tomschin, and Charles Heller, an expert on Border Forensics, on stage. Winkler emphasized Heller’s current research on the Polish–Belarusian border before inviting him to share his first impressions of the film.

Heller called the film incredibly moving and multilayered. He underlined how it shows that borders don’t stop at the border but spread into everyday life and essentially become skin color. Drawing from his research, he explained how exclusion not only appears on a national level but also in neighborhood interactions. The film’s close attention to a single street reveals how borders materialize in everyday life and people themselves. 

Heller also drew a parallel between the postman in the film and Talwar himself, as they both connect people who rarely meet. Talwar explained that his minimal setup created trust while keeping him constantly aware of his own presence. He tried to avoid those who were genuinely uncomfortable with the camera and focused on the people who naturally performed in front of the lens.

As a university student, I found this question particularly interesting, as Talwar described a narrow window in which the camera enables encounters but risks altering them. For most of the film, he succeeds in capturing people authentically, although a few scenes have a more performative tone. Yet this fits the film’s overarching theme of belonging. People constantly perform to please others and to affirm their place in society, as seen when Oscar, the Polish-Roma protagonist, wears Indian attire to honor his ancestry and signal a connection with Talwar. I believe this interplay of authenticity and performance becomes part of the film’s texture.

The conversation then shifted toward a broader context when Heller started drawing parallels between the personal isolation in Wolf Street and Europe’s growing nationalism. He wondered whether Talwar’s filming could be understood as a political intervention against such isolation, which proliferates across scales. Talwar explained that Poland only has a few shared social spaces left. “Societies become insular, and nations too become exclusive,” he said. Tomschin added that loneliness is rising across Europe, fostering fear of the “other”. For her, the film explores the search for community and the overcoming of the mental barriers we build around ourselves.

I felt the film’s intimate voice-over reflected this inner struggle and hinted at both the structural and personal nature of isolation. It’s not simply explanatory but rather resembles someone thinking aloud.

Winkler then asked Tomschin about her relationship to Poland and the project. Tomschin described how both she and Talwar lived on Wolf Street together: “I was sitting at the editing desk by the window and saw the lady from across with her blanket every day. It was funny, as we were editing on the set itself.” She explained how editing became an emotional process as they were processing experiences and feelings that had to show in the film. The project, she said, began from a feeling of loss, which grew into a reflection on belonging. The loss of Talwar’s friend recurs throughout the film and serves as the starting point for the individual narratives, she explained.

Talwar collected many stories, and the challenge was to condense them into coherent narratives. “Editing became a sort of playful task,” Tomschin said. “Anything could happen as we didn’t have a strict script.” She described editing as building connections between fragments and stories that might never meet in real life but resonate in the filmic space. 

I believe this echoed Heller’s earlier point about bridging distances. In this way, the film itself becomes a quiet intervention by connecting people who otherwise remain invisible to one another.

The conversation then shifted back to the initial start point of the discussion, as Winkler invited Heller to elaborate on his own research on the Polish–Belarusian border. Heller described the violent pushback regime at the Polish–Belarusian border and Belarus’s “instrumentalization” of migration. Belarus had loosened its border regulations with Poland to facilitate crossing for migrants from the East. In response, Poland and the European Union accused Belarus of using migrants to destabilize Europe and its border. Heller framed this as a hybrid war: “Once people who are already framed as a racial threat, especially Arabs and Roma, are now also cast as a geopolitical threat.”

Building on his argument, Heller then argues that the film reveals the absence of the cultural diversity that once characterized Poland. He explains that Talwar reactivates memories of a more pluralistic past through the main protagonist’s stories. In this way, Letters from Wolf Street counters nationalist narratives simply through the presence of difference.

As an audience member, I observed these exclusionary dynamics in the film through neighborhood rituals, racist comments, and avoidance behaviors. These scenes reveal how subtle gestures connect to broader patterns of radicalization and securitization across Europe.

Winkler then opened the floor for one question from the audience. When asked how Poland and Polish cinema ended up in his hands, Talwar laughed. Seeking distance from personal struggles, he and a friend discovered the Polish film school and were drawn to its film heritage: “There was a desire to escape, to go somewhere far away from my problems.” He concluded by explaining that the Polish public proved more open to the film than the film community itself.

After watching Letters from Wolf Street and hearing from Talwar and Tomschin, it was the film’s atmosphere that stayed with me. The pace is slow, sometimes awkward, sometimes beautiful, but always sincere. It challenges the viewer as it shows different opinions and stories. Even in the moments of tension, I felt empathy for the people on the screen and for the contradictions they embody. 

The film shows in a warm and humorous way how borders, fear, and belonging seep into daily life. I believe that the film gains much of its quality from editing, that merges individual experiences into one shared story. It invites viewers to immerse themselves in the daily life of Wolf Street and to reflect on how borders take shape in their own daily lives.