Agata Wieczorek
Writer / Director
Poland / Ireland
b.1992, Poland. Wieczorek is a visual artist and a filmmaker based in Ireland.
Her practice spans between staged documentary and documented fiction, employing still and moving image.
By exploring medical institutions and concealed intimate practices where simulation and artificiality are at play, she investigates the dynamics of power and systemic violence as cultural praxis. Topics: family, reproduction, childhood, pregnant bodies’ medicalization are for her a lens to explore Western thinking patterns about identity, intimacy, relation between the body and the State.
She graduated from National Film School in Lodz, Strzeminski School of Fine Arts and from Le Fresnoy. She is the recipient of the Irish Research Council Award and a PhD candidate at Dublin City University, where she leads research on reproductive cultures and women’s reproductive rights.
Her artistic and filmic work has been showcased and awarded internationally, in art institutions and film festivals.
Project
Tall Mountain
Mother’s leaving for a perilous mountaineering expedition coincides with Ewa starting a new job at a medical simulation center.
While caring for humanoid patients in an artificial hospital, Ewa develops a bond with a birthing robot Victoria. As Victoria’s pregnancy progresses, the robot seems to Ewa increasingly alive. Meanwhile Mother climbs higher, and Ewa grows strangely anxious about Mother’s life. The BDSM play and fetish community provides Ewa with release from inner tension.
Higher Mother climbs, larger Victoria’s pregnancy, deeper Ewa descends into the fetish underground and medical simulation – when Mother stops giving signs of life.
Medical and erotic worlds collide when Ewa faces Mother’s abandonment, and the gruesome reasons that caused it, hidden deep in the past.
Tall Mountain explores the intersections between the medical and erotic worlds to probe the ambiguous borders between care and violence both in medical institutions – and in the family relations. Set in contemporary Poland, Tall Mountain explores the trans-generational ruptures caused by the conservative catholic culture and perverted idea of motherhood, which Ewa subverts in the least evident of ways – to reconnect with Mother.
