Romani elders hold her responsible for revealing Romani secrets to the general public, and she is banished from the society of Polska Roma,3 suffers a nervous breakdown, and spends some time at a mental institution. The fame won by the publication of Papusza’s poetry proves problematic. This is not merely an act of blind despair, but a way of keeping the flat warm for the family weakling, Papusza’s and Dionizy’s adopted son Tarzan. In a particularly dramatic scene, a delirious Dionizy Wajs chops his former pride, the family wagon, into pieces. One witnesses the degradation faced by the community prevented from traveling, forced to live in houses where the men, in particular, unable to practice their traditional trade as musicians, sink into despair, passing time drinking and chatting about the old times. Afterwards, she and her husband Dionizy, 24 years her senior, return to their miserable quarters in Gorzów Wielkopolski in western Poland, where they have been living since their tabor stopped traveling in 1954.

She and her husband are seated along ministers, Party fat cats, and the cream of the Polish cultural establishment. The next scene takes the viewer to a prison somewhere in Poland where Papusza is serving a sentence for repeated theft (due to her husband’s love of stolen rather than bought poultry) she is put in a ministerial car and taken straight to the premiere of a bombastic piece of music to which her poems were set. The screenplay seems to be based on Papusza’s own account of her life - the events before the early 1950s in particular.īorn around 1910 in Lublin, she was declared to be fated to bring either pride or shame to her family. The idea of someone calling her songs “poetry” seemed outlandish to her. He translated what Papusza viewed as her “songs” into Polish. In addition to Papusza, Jerzy Ficowski, a student on the run from Communist repression - who, for a time, shared the couple’s life of traveling in the late 1940s - is in focus. The film offers interpretations of several phenomena: the fate of the Roma community in Poland from the interwar period to the 1970s the personal fate of the renowned Romani poet “Papusza”2 (Bronisława Wajs) and the poet’s relationship with her husband, Dionizy Wajs.

Papusza was first screened in autumn 2013. The Roma people have entered the spheres of media, education, and popular culture on an unprecedented scale.1 The film Papusza can be seen as a result of these processes. This has partly been a result of normal assimilation processes, but there has also been a shrinking distance between Roma and non-Roma, as well as a growing mobilization and sense of agency within Roma society. In recent decades, new relations between the majority population and Roma have been developing in Poland.

Pieśni mówione by Papusza