MOCAK Summer Cinema | Silent Twins

As usual, during the summer holidays, MOCAK invites viewers to evening film screenings. This year’s edition is inspired by the exhibitions currently on show.

The screenings will take place on Fridays from 4 July to 29 August in the museum arcades.

The 2025 Summer Cinema repertoire comprises contemporary European films, whose topic and emotional ambience correspond to the contexts of the current exhibitions. A generation of bold young filmmakers consistently use their idiosyncratic style to tell stories about entering adulthood, turbulent relationships with peers and adults, facing traumas, finding fulfilment, drawing strength from imagination, and the experiences of joys and sorrows from the perspective of childhood – a time when everything was simpler and yet most difficult. Breaking down the conventions of a specific genre, experimenting with the format or employing the convention of a fairy tale, each of the filmmakers touches on a different truth about what we experience as children and how it affects all of our later life.

Admission 10 PLN. Tickets can be purchased at the museum box office from Tuesday to Sunday from 11 am to 7 pm and online (while the limited numbers last). Tickets purchased electronically will be sent to the email address provided once the payment has been credited.

Cinema curator: Adrian D. Kowalski

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Friday 11 July 9 pm

Silent Twins

Poland, UK, 2022

directed by: Agnieszka Smoczyńska

1 h 53 min

In English, with Polish subtitles

Screened for the first time at the Cannes Film Festival, Silent Twins is the latest film by Agnieszka Smoczyńska, the creator of The Lure and Fugue. One of Poland’s most original directors, who talks about what is wild and untamed in us with the lightness of a dance step, again demonstrates her unfettered imagination in her English-language debut. The visionary and filled with music Silent Twins, although based on a documentary by Marjorie Wallace, bears the unmistakable stamp of the director’s hallmarks. And just like Smoczyńska’s previous films, it is shot from the perspective of women. This time, they are twins from Wales: June and Jennifer Gibbons, who have stopped communicating with the world. What their bleak provincial setup mainly has to offer to the black girls is humiliation; from it, the ‘silent twins’ escape into an explosion of neon colours, sprinkled with sunshine and fantasies of fame as writers, romantic love and swimming pools full of Pepsi-Cola. But June and Jennifer’s hormone-fuelled teenage imagination does have a dark side, as does their sisterly bond, with an undercurrent of rivalry. In creating the twins’ inner world on screen, Agnieszka Smoczyńska draws liberally on the aesthetics of old advertisements, glossy magazines and soap operas. She interweaves thriller with a sensual musical, and drama  with stop-motion animation. The emotional bomb that is Silent Twins also owes its energy to Letitia Wright (Black Panther, the Black Mirror series) and Tamara Lawrance (Small Axe series). The actresses create poignant roles of girls who cannot live either together or without each other, and whose teenage rebellion has spiralled out of control. Smoczyńska’s film can be read as a study of a toxic relationship, artistic genius or female rebellion. Perhaps it is a story of escape from a racist society, or perhaps a ballad about impossible love?

Trailer: youtube.com/watch?v=MDeOPJJcCGA