Damian Kocur is preparing La Manche, a new feature film that expands the Polish director's international footprint following Bread and Salt and Under the Volcano. The project, presented at the Venice Production Bridge, will be produced in Poland by Kijora Film and made in co-production with Germany's Oma Inge Film and France's Les Contes Modernes. The addition of two European partners marks a tangible phase in the project's development while reflecting the stature Kocur has gained across the continental arthouse cinema circuit.
The film will follow a young Warsaw resident who is offered an assignment on a foreign production shooting in Poland. Tasked with scouting locations and non-professional actors, the job takes him far from the capital, through small towns and rural villages across the country. It is a narrative device that sets the protagonist's perspective in motion, allowing the director to contrast different social worlds without reducing the story to a simple geographic divide between the city and the provinces.
According to details shared during the Venice presentation, La Manche aims to examine contemporary Poland through tones that blend comedy and drama. At its core are the stereotypes weighing on the country, the lingering presence of historical memory, and the material consequences of precarity for those entering the job market. Kocur does not frame the project as a genre film or straightforward social commentary; rather, the goal is to challenge established perceptions of Poland, including those shaped from the outside.
A local story tailored for European co-production
Partnering Kijora Film with two production companies from Germany and France carries industrial significance beyond the financial structure of a single title. Co-productions allow partners to share resources, expertise, and distribution pathways, but above all, they demand that a project rooted in a national context translate its underlying tensions for audiences elsewhere. In La Manche, Polish specificity is not diluted: it serves as the lens through which to explore cultural boundaries and disparities in perspective that run across Europe.
Producer Marta Szymanowska, who is overseeing the film for Kijora Film alongside Anna Gawlita, linked the interest of international partners both to the director's recent trajectory and to the project's subject matter. Under the Volcano, selected by Poland for the 2024 Oscar race, screened at over one hundred festivals worldwide. For a filmmaker, a festival presence does not automatically equate to a solid production setup for the next film, but it builds relationships, credibility with foreign counterparts, and a level of recognition that proves useful during the development phase.
In Kocur's case, continuity of method also matters. The director works with non-professional actors and regards casting primarily as an encounter with people, rather than an assessment of traditional acting training. This approach is consistent with a narrative that seeks to approach territories and communities without filtering them entirely through industry conventions. At the same time, it involves particularly delicate production work: scouting for faces, building relationships with locations, and managing individuals unaccustomed to a film set become a substantial part of constructing the film.
Borders, memory, and enduring images
One of the areas touched upon by La Manche will be along the border between Poland and Belarus, the backdrop of the migration crisis that previously found direct representation in Agnieszka Holland's Green Border. However, Kocur does not aim to revisit that theme with an interventionist film at the height of the emergency. As outlined, his perspective is post-traumatic: the crisis remains a central element, but it becomes part of a broader reflection on the marks left by the events, on memory, and on how a society incorporates or represses what happened.
The distinction is not incidental. Cinema that intervenes in current events also thrives on its timeliness and can influence public debate while the issue remains active in the present. Returning to the same ground later demands a different distance, less tied to the news cycle and more interested in what persists: the perception of the people involved, political fractures, landscapes transformed by the border, and the narratives circulating around it. La Manche appears to position itself on this second level.
The film will also challenge the idea of Poland as a place defined primarily by its twentieth-century tragedies, World War II, and the Holocaust. It is not a matter of denying the centrality of that history, but of contesting a reduction that can make the present invisible. For Kocur, the portrayal of the country also involves observing the relationships between the capital and peripheral areas, between the so-called West and Eastern Europe, and between those who arrive with preconceived notions and those who inhabit the observed territories.
From this perspective, even the job assigned to the protagonist serves a revealing purpose. A foreign film set scouting landscapes and people in Poland can become the space where outside expectations manifest: what people look to see, which traits are deemed authentic, and what is left outside the frame. Scouting locations and non-professional actors brings with it a very concrete question for cinema: who holds the right to tell the story of a place, and through what categories do they select it.
The terrain of polarization
Gawlita pointed to the critique of the urban perspective on the countryside and the Western gaze on Eastern Europe as key pillars of the project. It is a double asymmetry that can bring the film into dialogue with a broader discussion on contemporary European cinema. Stories set in marginal areas are often sought after for their symbolic charge, while the people who live in those places risk being reduced to emblems: of poverty, backwardness, the frontier, or national trauma.
La Manche will attempt to work on this tension without detaching it from economic conditions. The precariousness affecting young people entering the workforce is one of the film's declared dimensions, tied to the protagonist's journey, whose professional opportunity forces him to redefine his relationship with his own country. Internal polarization therefore appears not merely as an ideological clash: it concerns access to opportunities, mobility between center and periphery, and the unequal ability to be represented without becoming a caricature.
For the European audiovisual market, projects like this show why workshops and industry meetings tied to major festivals remain crucial. The Venice Production Bridge is not a showcase for finished films, but a space where titles in development can find co-producers and international partners. The announcement of Oma Inge Film and Les Contes Modernes' involvement gives La Manche a broader production base, but does not yet establish a shooting schedule, cast, or release date: these details have not been disclosed.
The next phase will therefore be turning the artistic framework and the newly formalized alliances into a film capable of preserving its author's observational freedom. Kocur starts from highly recognizable territory and sensitive political flashpoints, but the project seems intent on avoiding both a postcard of grief and an illustrative account. For the companies involved, the challenge will be guiding a work rooted in specific places toward an international audience without making it more uniform than its subject matter demands.
