Odile Allard

A mix of Rock and Roll and Blues are the secret for successful rebellion. When I took my camera to the middle of France where the GM&S factory was threatened by a permanent shut down, I felt like something extraordinary was about to take place. And it did. The lyrics were written by workers who have had enough! The tune was composed by people not afraid to go against even the rules of revolt! The volume was loud enough to attract the media. Their working-class concert spread across France like wild fire. I sat out of sight, camera in hand, filming like catching fish in a barrel.

A mix of Rock and Roll and Blues are the secret for successful rebellion. When I took my camera to the middle of France where the GM&S factory was threatened by a permanent shut down, I felt like something extraordinary was about to take place. And it did. The lyrics were written by workers who have had enough! The tune was composed by people not afraid to go against even the rules of revolt! The volume was loud enough to attract the media. Their working-class concert spread across France like wild fire. I sat out of sight, camera in hand, filming like catching fish in a barrel.

Lech Kowalski returns to Utica (New York), where he grew up. He decides to document the struggles of his fellow citizens by offering to pay to hear their stories.

Lech Kowalski travels the oldest highway in Poland, built by Hitler as an invasion route to the east. As the road literally crumbles into history he discovers that it is now a vital link to the west and encounters people and locations that connect it to the present. A hooker from Bulgaria under an umbrella scared her pimp may show up and see that business is horrible in the rain. A one legged man in a wheel chair selling mushrooms in the tornado like wake of speeding trucks describing the best way to cook what he sells. Destitute Ukrainians hiding on a former Warsaw Pact Nuclear air base serve tea to a former cop still patrolling the property. Young people escaping the glare of reality in underground bunkers built by the Nazis. Bombed out ruins still guarding stretches of the concrete road. Gypsies on a pilgrimage in Auschwitz twist the plot and suddenly we are in a candle lit hut, in a gypsy village listening to a man describe how he lost his father to the Holocaust.

‘Imagine if the Sex Pistols made boots instead of music’, says director Kowalski of a group of Cracow punks who make leather shoes for a living. They run their business as if they were a band of rock stars, living by their own rules, making the product by hand, heads bobbing in unison to their favourite bands. Kowalski’s roots in American underground cinema make him the perfect interpreter of the punk aesthetic.