25/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: Arjun Talwar talks about his toxic relationship with Poland, which emerges as funny, sad and universal

It’s a funny thing, living in a foreign country. There are some places that everyone dreams about. Nobody’s ever going to question your decision to move to Italy, for example, not after Under the Tuscan Sun, or to Paris after seeing Lily Collins drink Kir Royale scandalously early in the afternoon. Nobody’s ever going to ask: “Why?” But Arjun Talwar, who grew up in Delhi, went to Poland instead. “Why are we here? Fuck.” asks his collaborator on Letters from Wolf Street [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Mo Tan, and it’s a question that’s both hilarious and sad. They don’t know the answer, and the Polish people don’t know either.

What follows in this film is an investigation: of Talwar’s personal choices, of his friend’s tragic death, of Poland in general. The woman who lives next door would always wave at him. Then, on the street, she would behave as if they didn’t know each other. In his doc, shown in the Berlinale Panorama, he tries his hardest not to complain too much, but it becomes obvious that he feels lonely in Warsaw, on Wolf Street. But here’s the thing: he’s not the only one.

It’s a film about grief, really, or about survivor’s guilt. He came there with a friend, hoping for something better. “We felt like the first explorers,” he recalls. That glorious future never came – his friend passed away. Now, resigned, Talwar is trying to figure out if it was worth it, but Poland seems to be showing the exact same symptoms. People talk about loneliness all the time. They admit that whenever things were about to get good, “Putin or Hitler would mess it up.” Talwar claims Poland is a “mystery” to him, but he actually understands it much better than he thinks. Maybe that’s where the frustration kicks in: if you get it, if you understand how it feels to be alone and rejected, why aren’t you showing more understanding to others?

Talwar lists your usual Polish crimes here: racism (he’s continuously called “Michael Jackson”), intolerance and that infamous Independence March in November. “We don’t ‘tolerate’; we love immigrants. If they are deserving,” says someone here, and he probably didn’t even have to wait long for these quotes. There are mentions of the 1930s film Black Pearl with its tragic star Reri, or the pop hit “Makumba” by a band called Big Cyc – whose name translates as “Big Tit”. The 1990s were weird – involving an African boy who wanted to study in Poland, but “skinheads won’t let him live.” It’s all here, and worse besides, and it can’t be defended. But Talwar still cares so much.

One of those docs that’s trying to say something serious while being kind, it’s based on conversations with strangers and (mostly) a lack of judgement. Paweł Łoziński did it brilliantly in 2021’s The Balcony Movie [+see also:
film review
interview: Paweł Łoziński
film profile], where he would strike up random chats with people from his balcony. It might be an unfair comparison, however, because a) Łoziński is Polish, and b) while they can both be uplifting, Letters from Wolf Street lacks focus sometimes. After a while, it’s not just about one street or one city – it grows bigger and, frankly, gets lost. Then again, so does Talwar, unable to exit a toxic relationship with this country.

For this writer, it’s an interesting experience to watch this as a Polish person, living abroad in another country where people also seem more wary of strangers these days. “As a foreigner in London, I like that there are so many other foreigners,” said writer David Sedaris once. Until that happens, one supposes that loneliness comes with the (foreign) territory.

Letters from Wolf Street was produced by Uni-Solo Studio (Poland) and co-produced by inselfilm production (Germany).