Zuza Banasińska about her film Kontrewers

‘Klaps’ Newspaper Published on 26.09.2026

„Kontrewers”, reż. Zuza Banasińska

The film tells the story of an encounter between the spirit of a possessed girl, trapped for centuries inside a stone, and my 102-year-old grandmother, who is waiting to die in her room. The spirit, linked to a folk tale about a mysterious stone from Kontrewers village, begins to draw closer to the devout elderly woman, mistaking her for her long-lost mother.

Work on the film Kontrewers began with a fascination with how stories, and personal and collective traumas, are repressed, covered up, deemed resolved, and then return in a completely different form. Often not in words, but in gestures, bodily reactions, objects, and matter.

That is why I became so interested in the story of the stone from Kontrewers. The stone was discovered by chance, caused a huge controversy because of the Neolithic petroglyphs carved into its surface, and was then reburied. But it did not remain hidden for long. It was precisely this process – its appearance, disappearance and reappearance – that I found most fascinating. Something is buried, yet it does not disappear completely. It endures and waits for the right conditions in which it can emerge once more.

During my research, I also came across a folk tale about possession linked to the same stone. I became interested in the phenomenon of possession not as a pathology, but as a form of relationship with that which lies beyond directly accessible reality. Before it was completely subsumed by the Christian language of sin, illness and purification, possession could be understood as a means of communicating with something Other – with unknown forces, with memory, with the dead, with something that cannot quite be named.

So I began to think of possession not as something that needs to be ‘cured’ or cleansed, but as a way of co-existing. A situation in which two beings can find themselves in one body and, for a time, need not exclude one another.

In theory, this made sense, but how could it be understood in practice? I began to look for an example of endurance, of co-existence with layered memories and emotions. And that is how my grandmother, who was 102 at the time, became part of the project.

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She had been bedridden for five years – she was immobile, but her mind remained sharp and clear. She agreed to take part in the project on condition that I did not show her face. So I began with conversations. However, my aim was not to record her life story. We talked about life, death, faith, family, memory and what remains of a person. Her Catholic faith took on new dimensions for me, revealing a rejection of the dualism of soul and body in favour of all-encompassing entropic matter. Elevating matter to the realm of the sacred helped her to accept her situation with remarkable grace. Sometimes, however, for a moment – in a particular sentence, in her singing or in a gesture – one could see fear, anger or uncertainty.

Apart from the conversation, I was particularly fascinated by the gestures she used to express what she would never have dared to say. Her delicate, aristocratic hands, bearing the marks of almost a whole century’s history, became the focal point of this story. It was just her, me and Jakub Dylewski, the cinematographer, as we sought to create the most intimate atmosphere possible. At times she approached the staging in the film with curiosity, suggesting ideas of her own, whilst at other times she set very clear boundaries, reprimanding us for ideas that did not suit her. Many of these remarks found their way into the film. She knew what she didn’t want, when she’d had enough, and when it was time to stop. She never ‘surrendered’ herself completely to the film. And that was precisely what mattered to me. I wanted to speak with her, rather than about her, giving her the space to construct her own portrait, which also significantly influenced the structure of the film.

In the film, the spirit became, in a sense, my own personal medium, through which the stone and its folk history found their way into my grandmother’s room. And I, along with it, staged this encounter.

My grandmother passed away a few days after the film’s premiere. She managed to see it, but by then she wasn’t saying much – her condition had deteriorated. I don’t know what she thought of it, and I am confronted with that uncertainty at every screening.