Studium Polish Language de Łódź (Tour de Babel), 1966, Archives Miguel Sobrado
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THE TOWER OF BABEL
Studium Jezyka Polskiego, Łódź (The Tower of Babel), 1966, Miguel Sobrado Archives
Upon arrival in Poland, the Moroccan film students studied Polish language and culture for one year at the Studium Jezyka Polskiego in Łódź, nicknamed “The Tower of Babel”.
In his film, Lekcja 41 (Lesson 41, 1966), Abdellah Drissi captures this challenging experience of learning the language in professor Jan Kulak’s class.
Upon arrival in Poland, the Moroccan film students studied Polish language and culture for one year at the Studium Jezyka Polskiego in Łódź, nicknamed “The Tower of Babel”.
In his film, Lekcja 41 (Lesson 41, 1966), Abdellah Drissi captures this challenging experience of learning the language in professor Jan Kulak’s class.
At Studium Jezyka Polskiego de Łódź (The Tower of Babel), 1965-6. Photographs by Abdelkrim Derkaoui
“In Łódź, the foreigners—there were nearly three thousand of us—studied Polish for a year and then were dispatched to various universities and colleges in Poland. We were looked at with curiosity in Poland. Poles weren’t used to seeing foreigners. There were Vietnamese, Mongolians, Cubans, Chileans, Algerians, Tunisians, Cameroonians, even French students…. At the film school, there were about thirty foreigners, one Lebanese, an Iranian, a Tunisian, an Algerian, a Brazilian, a Ugandan, a Czech, two Argentines, a Mexican…. The Tunisian dropped out in the second year. People dropped out along the way. We were few in number, so we were very close.”
ABDELKADER LAGTAA, 2019
Book, Jezyk Polski [The Polish language: script for foreigners],
“The 1960s were the culmination of decolonization, with the Vietnam War and agrarian wars around the world. The Soviet Union, China, and Cuba played a very important role in this. The Socialist bloc was educating students from the Third World, and that’s how Mostafa Derkaoui and I ended up in Poland. The Derkaoui brothers were my Polish-language study buddies at Łódź from 1965 to 1966 at “The Tower of Babel” and it was there that we developed a special friendship. I later studied sociology and they studied cinema, but we remained very close.”
Miguel Sobrado (Costa Rica), 2018
Miguel Sobrado (b. 1942) In 1959, the year of the victory of the Cuban revolution, Sobrado was a 17-year-old guerrilla in Nicaragua. He went to study in Poland, where he met the Derkaoui brothers at “The Tower of Babel” (centre for Polish language learning) in 1965, before going to study sociology in Warsaw. Based on articles written during his studies, he published a book with the Polish intellectual Kowalewski, who lived in Łódź: “Antropologia de la guerrilla” (1971, Venezuela). This work and the discussions between Kowalewski and Sobrado would act as inspiration for Mostafa Derkaoui’s final year student film, Gdzies Pewnego Dnia [Somewhere on a Given Day], in which Sobrado also acted. He also appears in the Polish language class in the film Lekcja 41 by Abdellah Drissi.
Copyright © 2020 / Léa Morin — CINIMA3 / Talitha