BALLADAMOTOCYKLOWA

I grew up in Western Pomerania — in a landscape where history never felt completely finished. German houses, Polish families, post-war migrations, forgotten cemeteries, changed street names and local stories exist there side by side. The past is not hidden. It remains physically present in the landscape, even when nobody speaks about it.

This is where BALLADA begins for me.

Jan Kłos is not intended to represent a generation, a nation or a political position. He is one ordinary man whose life repeatedly collides with extraordinary historical forces. He is born Hans Kloss. History later makes him Jan Kłos. Another system eventually turns him into Jan Los. Each name is real at the moment in which he carries it, yet none of them completely explains who he is.

I am interested in that unstable space between identity and the identities imposed upon us by history. A border changes. A government changes. A language changes. Yesterday's enemy becomes today's neighbour. A person who was German can suddenly be expected to become Polish. A celebrated hero can become a suspect. An official version of the past can disappear almost overnight and be replaced by another one.

BALLADA therefore refuses a clean division between historical drama, satire, memory and myth. I want these registers to coexist. Political absurdity can be funny and frightening in the same moment. A grotesque situation may reveal something more truthful than a realistic reconstruction. A private memory may contradict the official record and still carry an emotional truth that the record cannot contain.

Animation gives me the freedom to treat all of these realities as equally tangible.

A factory can remain a factory and, within a single movement, become a memory of an interrogation room. A motorcycle can be a machine, an instrument of escape, a stage prop, a rocket and finally something closer to a mythological creature. A provincial landscape can open into Hyperborea. The border between the historical and the impossible does not need to be announced — it can simply dissolve.

This is fundamental to the way I want to direct the film. I do not see the fantastic elements as interruptions of reality. They are another layer of it. Ingeborga, the Hyperborean songs, recurring signs, transformations and impossible events gradually reveal a second order beneath the visible world.

That order is never explained completely. I do not want BALLADA to become a system of symbols that the viewer is expected to decode. Mystery must remain mystery. The audience should be allowed to feel connections before understanding them — and sometimes never understand them rationally at all.

I am equally interested in the comedy of history. Great political systems present themselves as monumental, inevitable and permanent. From the perspective of an individual life, however, they can appear chaotic, theatrical and deeply absurd. BALLADA looks at the twentieth century from below: from workshops, village roads, bedrooms, amusement parks, railway platforms, bars and motorcycles.

The monumental is continually interrupted by the ordinary. Ideology collides with desire. Propaganda collides with human weakness. History collides with a broken engine that still needs to be repaired.

Jan is a mechanic, and this matters to me. He believes that things can be repaired. Machines make sense to him because every failure has a cause. Human history does not offer him the same comfort. The world around him repeatedly breaks, changes its rules and demands that he adapt. His instinct is nevertheless always the same: to look inside the mechanism and try to understand how it works.

The motorcycle becomes the physical extension of this character. It survives political systems, borders, relationships and identities. It gives Jan movement when history attempts to trap him. Again and again he escapes on it — sometimes literally, sometimes emotionally. It is one of the few objects in his life that seems to belong entirely to him.

My visual approach follows the same principle. I do not want a polished reconstruction of the twentieth century. I want a world that appears remembered rather than photographed: unstable lines, visible pigment, imperfect surfaces, missing details, exaggerated faces and selective fragments of reality.

The image should carry the vulnerability of memory. Some things are precise. Others disappear. Certain objects acquire an impossible importance, while entire environments may dissolve into colour, paper and gesture.

I want movement to preserve that handmade instability. Characters should not behave like perfect digital puppets. Their gestures can be economical, awkward, tender or grotesque. Stillness is as important as motion. A look, a pause, the sound of a machine or the rhythm of a motorcycle may carry more meaning than a large animated gesture.

Music works in the same way. It is not decoration placed behind the images. Songs and sounds belong to different layers of the film's reality. Some are historical. Some emerge from popular culture. Others appear to come from somewhere much older than history itself. The Hyperborean songs gradually become another form of narration — a language whose meaning is sensed before it is understood.

At the centre of all these layers remains one small human life.

Jan does not control history. He barely understands most of what happens around him. Yet his existence touches war, ideology, love, political violence, technological dreams, migration and myth. In that sense his provincial life is not peripheral at all. It contains the same forces that shaped an entire continent.

I want BALLADA to leave the viewer with affection for this fragile, imperfect man — but also with a slight uncertainty about everything they have just witnessed.

Was Jan carried by coincidence? By history? By his own decisions? By something Ingeborga understood from the beginning?

I do not want to answer that question. I want the film to leave it alive.