Conjuring a claustrophobic vision of post-nuclear Poland, Piotr Szulkin lends his satirical eye to the weaponization of religion as a means of social control. A utilitarian triumph of ramshackle world-building, O-Bi, O-Ba is a hallucinatory examination of apocalyptic anxieties in the atomic age.

Dit Kafkaiaanse werk van speculatieve sciencefiction, gebaseerd op Joodse legenden, is het debuut van een van de grootste visionairs van de 20e eeuw. Vanuit de nachtmerrieachtige wereld van goden en monsters smeedt Piotr Szulkin een Prometheus als allegorie voor het Poolse communistische experiment.

Pulled from the Cannes competition in the same year that Poland declared martial law, Piotr Szulkin’s tale of alien invasion is a blazing satire of the media machine. Dedicated to H.G. Wells and Orson Welles, this noir-inflected sci-fi is an eerily prescient interrogation of the fake-news era.

Taking inspiration from Pasolini’s La Ricotta, Piotr Szulkin closes his “Apocalyptic Tetralogy” with an anarchic riff on the Passion of Christ. The funniest of the four films, Ga-Ga: Glory to the Heroes is a rich sci-fi allegory that puts the European colonial project in its satirical crosshairs.