There is a kind of filmmaker who trusts that the truth is already out there — buried in basements, sealed in government vaults, spooled onto forgotten reels of film — and that the job is simply to find it, free it, and let it speak. Maciej Drygas is that kind of filmmaker, and for more than three decades, he has been doing exactly that with a precision and moral seriousness that places him among the most important documentary filmmakers working in Europe today.
Born in 1956 in Łódź, Poland, Drygas studied film directing at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow before returning home to work as an assistant director for two titans of Polish cinema: Krzysztof Zanussi and Krzysztof Kieślowski. The education shows. Like Kieślowski, Drygas is drawn to the quiet weight of ordinary lives caught in the machinery of history. Like Zanussi, he approaches his subjects with a philosophical seriousness that refuses easy answers. But Drygas has developed a voice entirely his own — one built from the hiss of old audiotape, the grain of archival 16mm, and the testimony of people the official record tried very hard to forget.
American audiences are only now beginning to encounter his work, and the timing could not be better.
The Detective’s Eye
In an interview with DOK.REVUE, Drygas described his approach to documentary filmmaking with characteristic precision: “I not only use archives but also create them.” That double identity — as both excavator and custodian of historical memory — is the key to understanding everything he does. His “incurable disease,” as he calls it, is a love for archival materials that dates back to the 1980s, when he was researching a screenplay about the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and found himself mesmerized by the combination of reality and fiction that historical documents produce. The screenplay was killed by censors. The obsession never died.
What makes Drygas distinctive is not just that he works with archives, but how he works with them. He approaches historical footage the way a detective approaches a crime scene — alert to what has been overlooked, willing to spend months on what others would write off as a dead end. When making State of Weightlessness, he listened to all 650 hours of Earth-to-space recordings from a single cosmonaut’s mission. When making One Day in People’s Poland, he spent years traveling across Poland with a 16mm projector in one hand and an 8mm one in the other, screening every piece of amateur footage he could find. When a museum director told him there were no recordings in his basement, Drygas asked about the basement specifically — and found hundreds of boxes of film reels.
Hear My Cry (1991)
Drygas’s debut documentary remains one of the most important films in the history of Polish cinema. Hear My Cry tells the story of Ryszard Siwiec — a 59-year-old accountant, husband, father of five, and former Polish Home Army resistance fighter — who, on September 8, 1968, set himself on fire at Warsaw’s 10th-Anniversary Stadium during a massive state-sanctioned harvest festival attended by tens of thousands, including top Communist officials. It was a protest against the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and it was the first act of its kind in the Eastern Bloc. The secret police immediately moved to bury it, spreading rumors that Siwiec had been a schizophrenic and an alcoholic. For more than two decades, the story disappeared entirely.
What survived was seven seconds of wide-angle archival footage. A small figure in the center of the frame. Children dancing below. People fleeing to the sides. One hundred and sixty-nine frames.
According to his DOK.REVIEW interview, Drygas spent months working with his cameraman to stretch that footage into six minutes of screen time, rephotographing every tenth frame, building a storyboard like an animator, using a microlens to pull close-ups from a panoramic shot. The result is one of the most technically inventive and emotionally devastating sequences in documentary history. “When I first saw his face in close-up on the big screen,” Drygas has said, “I realized that he was already on the other side during his act — there is no pain or suffering in his face.” The film structures itself as a spiral, moving through the testimony of Siwiec’s family and friends before arriving at the act itself, so that by the time we reach those seven seconds, we understand exactly what we are watching and exactly what it cost.
State of Weightlessness (1994)
Drygas’s second documentary turns to the Soviet space program, but the real subject is transcendence — what it costs a person, and what it costs a civilization, to reach beyond the atmosphere. Drawing on 650 hours of Earth-to-space recordings and the testimony of prominent cosmonauts, including Gherman Titov, Georgi Grechko, Valeri Polyakov, and others, the film captures the Soviet space program at the moment of its host nation’s collapse: cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev launched from the USSR and returned to the newly established Russia.
The film is not a nostalgia piece. It is something stranger and more honest. The cosmonauts speak candidly about the practical indignities of life in orbit — sleeping, eating, and managing bodily functions in zero gravity are not glamorous — but also about the experiments their government conducted on them, the psychological toll, the families lost, and the permanent disabilities incurred. One man describes being administered an anesthetic that numbed his pain while leaving him fully conscious, like a real-life out-of-body experience. The footage Drygas unearthed from that locked Moscow basement — experiments on animals and humans, a monkey stretched out like Christ on a centrifuge, staring into the camera with unmistakable horror — had never been seen publicly before.
What the film ultimately offers is what a good documentary always offers: a front-row seat to the human side of a story we thought we knew. The Soviet and American space programs were mirror images in more ways than the official record admitted. The dream was the same. So was the price.
Voice of Hope (2002)
Between 1953 and 1994, Radio Free Europe was for millions of Poles living under Communism exactly what its name promised — a voice reaching through the static of totalitarian information control to tell them the truth. Listening to it was itself an act of private resistance. Voice of Hope builds its portrait of the legendary broadcaster through rare archival materials and interviews with former RFE staff, but its most remarkable subjects are the operators tasked by the Polish state with jamming the signal. Their testimony gives the film a unique and unsettling quality: the people who worked hardest to silence the voice of hope turn out to have heard it most clearly.
One Day in People’s Poland (2005)
Thursday, September 27, 1962, was a completely ordinary day in the Polish People’s Republic. Nothing of note happened. Drygas spent years reconstructing it anyway.
Working from the secret police archives of the Institute of National Remembrance, he assembled surveillance reports, citizen complaint letters, and intercepted personal mail — the bureaucratic detritus of a state so paranoid it documented everything, including a heated Central Committee debate about the appropriate length to discuss male anatomy in a medical journal. He then layered these documents, read aloud by ordinary voices recruited from villages and hospitals, over promotional Party newsreels and private amateur footage. The result is a found-footage film that reveals, with chilling precision, the absurdity of a totalitarian state that policed its citizens’ bedrooms while congratulating itself on building a workers’ paradise.
Trains (2024)
Trains is Drygas’s most formally rigorous film and his most ambitious. With no narration, no interviews, and no added dialogue, the film draws on materials from 46 European wartime archives to reconstruct the role of the railroad in both World Wars. It opens with a factory floor in the 1910s — men assembling a locomotive — and closes on the liberation, following the same rail lines through boot camps and front lines, SS compartments and cattle cars, factory floors staffed by women and freight cars overflowing with the dead.
The film’s score, Paweł Szymański’s “Compartment 2, Car 7,” combined with sound design by Lithuanian artist Saulius Urbanavicius, does for this film what silence does for a great photograph: it makes you look harder. Trains is not a nostalgia trip or a leisurely rail journey. It is a somber obituary for a world at war — and evidence that Drygas, working entirely without words, can make you feel the full weight of the twentieth century through nothing but image and sound.
A Memory That Will Last
Drygas today runs two major archival initiatives: the Archive of the Film School in Łódź, which contains over six hundred documentary films dating to 1949, and the Polish Archive of Home Films at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, where he has collected fifty family archives totaling approximately seventy-five hours of home footage, digitized free of charge and mapped geographically online. He has given masterclasses to the Polish National Archives. He jokes, only half-joking, that he is “the chief Polish archivist.”
He is also one of Europe’s essential filmmakers, and American audiences are long overdue for an introduction.
For a deeper look at Drygas’s approach to archival filmmaking, read Tereza Domínová’s 2024 interview with the filmmaker at DOK.REVUE: “Maciej Drygas: I’m the Chief Polish Archivist.”
