‘Letters From Wolf Street’: Immigrant blues

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. To turn the camera on yourself to tell the story is an act of defiance—the storyteller is the story, both birther and birthed. It is also indulgent, and its indulgence is often forgiven.

Charm twists the demands we make of people, of cinema, and filmmaker Arjun Talwar knows this. The fragile quality of Talwar’s Letters From Wolf Street comes from this charm that tunnels us through his memoir of an Indian immigrant who tries and fails, but whose failure does not stop him from keeping on trying to find a home in Poland, awash with cultural xenophobia and neighbourly love. Wolf Street is where Talwar lives, in central Warsaw, full of Vietnamese restaurants (which locals call Chinese restaurants), an anarchist shoe repairman, a postal officer who is also an archivist, police stations and funeral homes.

This film, cataloguing the life of this street, also explores post-World War II Polish culture at large, bullet wounds in buildings and deeper ones in the zeitgeist, one where the independence day parade is also the space for banners of “White Lives Matter", Polish pride and white fragility’s meeting place. And what does Talwar do at such a protest? Ask a man if he could borrow his Polish flag—in Polish, Talwar speaks the language fluently—and then waving it, looks back at the camera, a cheeky wink of a gesture. Talwar and his friend Mo Tan—a woman whose face is made for humour—is handling the sound.

At one point she says that it feels like a funeral. Humour destabilizes the tension of two people of colour in a space creeping with unexpressed violence. Talwar’s presence is so front-and-centre that this indulgence begins to scar the film’s affect.