Hello, my friend,

Despite my announcement last week, I haven't split this newsletter into two different ones just yet - I’ve been without my laptop and creating new email funnels on my phone is too much of a pain. Putting this newsletter together at all was a bit of a bugger to be honest! Hope you like how it turned out either way.

Polish stuff

This week saw the release of my cousin Xawery's new film in Polish cinemas. His films are usually arthouse affairs that split audiences who watch them, while his TV work is mostly crowd-pleasing crime dramas. Now he’s trying something new entirely, and in a genre I love.

Many of my favourite films are comedy horror. The Evil Dead trilogy, the Gremlins movies and Peter Jackson's Braindead are all unassailable classics in my mind.

Poland is not known for the genre, but there’s actually been a small surge in Polish comedy horror over the last couple of years. I saw two examples on Netflix: one called Nobody Sleeps In The Woods Tonight made the monsters a pair of undead twins in a nod to Polish politics. It did have a couple of moments of pure comedy but I'm not sure I'd recommend it. The other movie was All My Friends Are Dead, which was more farcical and good splattering fun. Neither were particularly memorable, but fine weekend sofa fare.

Joining in on this wave is now Xawery Żuławski’s Apokawixa. You can watch the trailer here, but be warned: it’s one of those useless trailers that just chronologically condenses the plot and leaves no mystery. (Nor does it have English subtitles 😢). Meanwhile, the two posters I’ve included in this newsletter are very different: an official one made by marketers, and the other made by Xawery’s wife Mania Strzelecka for fun.

I watched the film yesterday. It was the first time I'd been to the cinema in nearly 3 years (due to the pandemic and fatherhood). I was pleased to see that back rows are still taken up by teenagers.

The film was good energetic fun and hits the right tone with its social satire and silly teenage love triangles. A couple of big Polish stars are in it briefly, looking like they’re having the time of their lives. Although the zombies don’t feature that much in it, it’s safe to say Apokawixa is the best Polish zombie film ever made... Let’s see how long it can hold that title, since it doesn't exactly have any competition at the moment.

Leaving the cinema, I overheard many of the teens laughing and shouting "Ale gówno!" ("What a load of shit!"), and then laughing enthusiastically about which parts they thought were shit. That is an excellent reaction in my opinion - many of my very favourite cinema experiences were laughing at shit films, it must be said.

Non-Polish stuff

I did a lot of thinking about building niches and creating categories this week. I came up with a creative writing niche that I'm going to explore through mini-essays on Twitter. The category is: Doomer Self-help. If feedback is good, my aim is to write enough of these to compile into a short ebook, and to use that as an incentive for signing up to the Procrastilearning mailing list after I finally split up this newsletter.

What is Doomer Self-help? It's self-improvement advice for people who are convinced everything is completely screwed and beyond saving. Yes, cheery stuff.

I’ll share my first attempts next week, but in the meantime here is a short piece from August that was one of the seeds. If you have any thoughts about this concept and my plans for it, just reply to this email.

Podcast of the week

For about a decade, much of my life has been centred in Poland, although I've always kept one foot back in the UK. Being split between two countries is not a rare experience, but I've not seen or heard many things that convincingly convey what it's like.

That was until I listened to this 1-hr podcast documentary by Miguel Macias (or here on Spotify), a Spanish audio producer who moved to the US a couple of decades ago. He’s spent every summer since back in Spain. Through his interviews with his loved ones over the last 12 or so years, you see that he's almost split himself in two, especially when he finds love in one country with someone who doesn’t cross the pond with him. I found it very moving and I highly recommend you listen, particularly if you’ve called more than one country your home.

That’s it for this week. I will be back using a mouse soon, and I wish you equally fortuitous computer adventures wherever you are too. Thanks for reading!

Adam

Adam Zulawski

TranslatingMarek.com / Procrastilearning.com / More stuff

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