{"id":933475,"date":"2026-10-19T06:58:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-19T06:58:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/933475\/"},"modified":"2026-10-19T06:58:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T06:58:14","slug":"adelaide-film-festival-review-agata-the-writer-inreview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/933475\/","title":{"rendered":"Adelaide Film Festival review: Agata the Writer – InReview"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Agata\u2019s editor offers her an apartment in Sarajevo to write her next book, the Polish Australian goes for it, thinking maybe she\u2019ll write a story set in the \u201890s, during the siege of Sarajevo. Perhaps it\u2019ll be about a father and her daughter, hiding out in the woods and trying to survive unnoticed. Agata is Polish, and Poland\u2019s not so far from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the language is similar, so it makes a kind of sense to her. Besides, she wants to write something serious, something counter-intuitive to her usual quirky, comedic novels.<\/p>\n

This really is as far as the plot takes us, the bulk of the film being a kind of cinematic exploration of story appropriation. When a painting of a defecating woman goes missing from Agata\u2019s temporary apartment, as does a vase that looks like a ceramic turd, and when Agata coincidentally sees a pornographic magazine at the home of a man who lost his wife and child to the war \u2013 a man Agata is interviewing \u2013 and the cover is of another woman defecating, are we meant to wonder if it\u2019s Agata taking a dump on the survivors and their trauma and the memory of those who lost their lives?<\/p>\n

As writer and \u00a0director Kuba Dorabialski<\/a> (winner of the John Fries Award and the Fisher\u2019s Ghost Art Award) said in a Q&A after the Australian premiere of Agata the Writer at the Adelaide Film Festival, he loves \u201cthe things on the edges of plot\u201d so he\u2019s not too concerned with who stole the painting or the vase, or why the old man might have the magazine and whether it\u2019s a coincidence or not. Much of the film fits into this vague symbolism \u2013 if you want it to. The viewer concerned with the question of who has a right to tell someone\u2019s story will look deeper at every lengthened contextualising frame \u2013 and there are many.<\/p>\n

Dorabialski, whose background is in video art, is also the editor of Agata the Writer, as well as the composer, and the music and the extended scenic shots are slow and heavy, and feel so integral to the narrative arc that they replace the usual narrative tropes of dialogue and action. They seem to be shrouded in the moodiness of place, and it\u2019s one way to tell the story of Serjievo without telling the painful story of Sarajevo.<\/p>\n

Somewhat similar to Dorabialski, who was born in Poland but lives in Sydney, the prolific and versatile Canberra-born Mia Wasikowska (Tracks, Club Zero) plays Agata, and has Polish lineage on her mother\u2019s side. Like the two defecating women in the film, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a coincidence that these artists are telling Agata\u2019s story and, in a roundabout way, the story of the siege of Sarajevo.<\/p>\n

For both Dorabialski and Wasikowska, the monologue that really turns filmic storytelling on its head by bringing literature and cinema together in the most unique way feels personal as it interrogates who is allowed to tell someone else\u2019s story. It is, indeed, an intense and up-close monologue that Wasikowska delivers brilliantly, and Dorabialski took a huge risk with it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an example of why he received a nomination for the Giornate degli Autori\u00a0at the Venice Film Fest, where the film had its world premiere. Since this is an award that spotlights independent works by lesser-known filmmakers \u2013 like previous winners Sarah Polley and Denis Villeneuve \u2013 who\u2019ve gone on to have critically successful careers, I think the question of \u2018Who is allowed to tell someone else\u2019s story\u2019 is answered by asking, \u2018How will you tell a story so that it\u2019s truthfully yours?\u2019.<\/p>\n

Agata the Writer<\/a> screens again on Saturday October 24 as part of Adelaide Film Festival 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Agata\u2019s editor offers her an apartment in Sarajevo to write her next book, the Polish Australian goes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":933476,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,344],"class_list":["post-933475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=933475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/933476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=933475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=933475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=933475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}