Mereghetti’s report card: «Hometown – The road of memories» Polanski and Horowitz: trip to Poland so as not to forget (grade 8)

«It would have been better if my whole life had turned out differently… Everyone has problems but they don’t have the heavy burden that I have had to carry all my life. It is the voice of Roman Polanski which welcomes the viewer as he is returning together with the photographer Ryszard Horowitz in Krakow, more or less fifty years after leaving it. They both consider themselves authentic “Krakowians” (even if Polanski was born in Paris but when he was three years old, in 1936, growing anti-Semitism in France had prompted his parents to return to the hometown of the father) and for this reason they accepted the proposal of two Polish documentary filmmakers, Mateusz Kudla and Anna Kokoszka-Romer, to return to the city where they had lived as teenagers. A city that had seen them deal with the Nazi invasion and what it had entailed. The result is
«Hometown – Memory Street»a film that goes far beyond the documentary it wanted to be, to become a reflection on sense of memory and dealing with one’s past.

He says it right away Horowitzsix years younger than Polanski (he was born in 1939), when he admits that despite the years spent apart – for some time lives in New York — he realizes returning to those places that “everything is fixed in the memory” because, as Polanski reiterates, “every stone remembers something”. So we follow the two friends prowling by roadsrecognize houses and squaresfind the cinema where they went as children (“How many times have we seen “Snow-white”?») but also realizing that that path he is not innocent or painless and that the memory, especially that of painful eventsstruggles to find a way to express themselves with words.

Polanski first seems to want to hide behind the difficulty of giving a rational form of pain (“it’s hard to tell, you have to experience it”) then, when he starts to retrace the events who saw his parents deported – his mother to Auschwitz, from which he did not return, his father to Mauthausen, where instead he managed to to survive — he admits that memories they can be terrible: “I don’t want to erase them” but they must “remain in memory as they are because I don’t want to deform them”. And to Horowitz who points out how i beautiful memories are printed in the mind while those ugly end up being like blurryreplies that «that’s why I don’t want to make a film about that period in Krakow: they are important memories for me and this visit is a bit blurringbut it would be worse if I made a film, if I had to redo everything artificially: there would be nothing left in the my memory».

So then the film is not only an opportunity to retrace the dark years of theNazi occupation of Krakow, with the construction of the boundary wall the ghetto and you continue roundups, but also reflect on the weight and value that memory can have. On the one hand there is disconsolate reaction of Horowitz, whose family and himself as a six-year-old survived Auschwitz because his parents had been factory workers Schindler who protected them from the gas chambers: «People don’t learn anything from history, they don’t draw no lessons” He says.

On the other hand, there is the opposite behavior of Polanski who seeks in theirony and maybe even a little in the cynicism the strength to come to terms with his past: when he tells the father’s funeralwith all the inconveniences he had to face starting with the completely drunk gravediggers of the Bongo honors (this is the inexplicable name of those who organized the burials), only laughter seems capable of exorcise a memory which should instead trigger tears. And with the same lightness a little unaware of those who know that they cannot abandon themselves to the pain of memories, we see him find the nephew of the woman who hid him in the countryside when his parents had been deported. An apparently superficial attitude but instead deeply humanof those who have suffered a lot (“we are products of the past” says Horowitz) and yet do not want to stop have faith in life.