Ulica Graniczna (Border Street)

“A film about ordinary people amid great historical events,” according to its director. The film tells the story of a group of children from Jewish and Polish families living on Border Street in Warsaw, offering a poignant, sensitive, and unsettling look at relations between communities during the Nazi occupation, reflecting a city split between two worlds: the “Aryan” side and the ghetto.

Shot in the shadow of the ghetto’s ruins, it addresses Jewish resistance and survival, and is one of the first films made after the Second World War to deal with the Shoah. Border Street recreates the Warsaw ghetto uprising, when a small heroic group chose to resist the Nazis rather than accept deportation to Auschwitz or Treblinka.

Aleksander Ford, a key and controversial figure in Polish cinema (born Mosze Lifszyc in Łódź), combined international artistic success with a strong connection to the communist regime. Director of more than twenty films, he was a mentor to filmmakers such as Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polański, and the architect of Polish film infrastructure. However, he was also a censor and an obstacle for other creators. In 1968, following the antisemitic purge, he was banned from working in Poland and lived a long exile that ended in the United States, where years later he took his own life. His career was that of a brilliant, complex filmmaker marked by the fractures of his time.

In collaboration with the Polish Cultural Institute in Madrid