In a Polish folktale, a young possessed woman has lived for centuries inside the mysterious Kontrewers Stone. Zuza Banasińska — who presented work at IndieLisboa in 2024 — draws on this ghostly figure to set fiction and reality simmering in the same pot. Her 102-year-old grandmother, confined to her bedroom and gently waving toward death, encounters — and becomes enchanted by — the relic (or by the haunting presence that inhabits it), in a lucid affirmation that communication is far more than words.
In Kontrewers, legend has it that a young woman committed murder with a stone. Since then, the stone has never stopped growing. The soul of a girl trapped in a stone that continues to grow speaks to a 102-year-old woman. Believing she has found her mother, she begins an unsettling dialogue that spans the entire film. Obliterating space and moving freely across shots of the most varied origins, this cosmic dialogue, in a mixed-media approach that surprises at every turn with its unexpected cohesion, creates a journey through textural raccords, exploring both the violence inherent in this story and the violent history of these textures. Beyond the cruelty, the film seeks this synthesis in great tenderness: the filmmaker’s delicate interest in this story and in her own grandmother, the vision that allows her to delve into this approach. (Vasco Muralha)
