PL
The Dream Project

Projects

The Dream Project is the single IFF initiative that is aimed at supporting other foundations. We are determined to make use of our experience and knowledge of photo shoot production so that we may support the dreams of Poland’s underprivileged youth and help them to come true. 

 

We decided to open up the subject to conversations with cultural icons who have achieved a great deal of success in their own fields – but who still have some unfulfilled dreams of their own. These conversations form the basis for presenting these icons and their dreams through film and photographs.

The photographs produced as part of the project have been made available in the form of limited-edition collector’s prints sold at auction. We use the income from the sale of the photographs to make dreams come true for children with serious illnesses and to fund other charitable causes.

In November 2017, we hosted the first charity auction of the ‘Dream Project’. In total, we raised nearly 200, 000 zł, which was donated in full to the Fundacja Mam Marzenie (I Have a Dream Foundation) that is aimed at making dreams come true for children with serious illnesses, as well as to the Nasza Fundacja (Our Foundation) that supports an orphanage in the Podkarpacie region of Poland.

The Dream Projects is still going strong. New photographs and interviews and currently in production and will be exhibited and auctioned off in support of future charitable causes.

To follow the latest from the Dream Project, check out the Facebook page HERE

The project is made possible thanks to the efforts of Polish artists, scientists, leaders and athletes. Here are the people who are part of the project and doing their part to make the dreams of these children come true. Below, we present their responses to a question about their own dreams.

photo: Bernard Kwapiński

text: Anna Kaplińska

Andrzej Seweryn

“For every man who wants to be treated like a real man, Agent 007 is quite important. For many men, he is a mythical figure, representing the ultimate goal of our efforts (laughs). And that’s also why I thought about him right away when I was asked about the biggest dream I had in childhood. […] In my personal collection of pop icons, there are three James Bonds. The one played by Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan. At a certain point, as a joke, I asked myself what a Polish James Bond would look like. And it turned out that there is a Bond in Poland, after all – and that is Andrzej Seweryn."

photo and text: Michał Szlaga

Watch video here

Paweł Althamer

I decided to call up the artist Paweł Althamer to invite him to join the Dream Project. I asked him who he once wanted to be and whether he had any dreams that were still unfulfilled. His reply:

“I always wanted to be a happy person and a member of a happy society. I might still want to break out of jail and take others out with me, but that’s also a dream of happiness.”

OK but how would you translate that into a photograph? Do you have any clues for me?

“The best thing would be to take my picture with my family and friends. There was a painter 100 years ago in Switzerland, Otto Mayer, he lived in an artists’ colony in the mountains of Amden on Lake Walen for a dozen years or so. The artists, reformers, occultists, spiritual clairvoyants who were longing for a better life and pursuing God created this place – they were like the first sort of hippies. I’d like to be part of such a wonderful place, where I have nature would be the most important interlocuter for me and my loved ones. I have a place like this that I’m working on with Matejka (ed: Paweł Althamer’s wife) and to spend as much time with my nearest and dearest as possible…”

 

photo: Michał Szlaga

text: Anna Kaplińska

Watch video here 

Jerzy Vetulani

“As a child, I wanted to be pearl diver. I would read stories about pearl divers and I would have been happy to go into this underwater world. After all, that’s where we can meet goldfish and mermaids. They tell me that when I was born, my mother said: I wish for you to be good and to be happy. So, I would tell that goldfish: ‘Listen fish, make me good and happy.’ I wanted to ask it to make it so I wouldn’t experience any breakdown in my working memory, any weakening of my mental state, balance or a slowing down my running pace. And to stop my eyesight from worsening.”

photo: Adam Pańczuk

text: Anna Kaplińska

Watch video here 

Józef Wilkoń

“I’ve had a feeling inside ever since I was a child. I have been carrying around this feeling, which has remained so strong within me, so distinct, that I can still describe it to this day. Whenever I walked into the woods, I would feel so high, as if it were a holy place, full of majesty. My father once took me to the Puszcza Niepołomicka near Wieliczka. And we walked in that beautiful forest and something incredible was happening to me… I felt as if I had walked into a temple. It might sound a bit pathetic, too lofty perhaps, but that’s how I felt. Ever since then, I have had a sense of respect, a love for the beauty of nature through the forest, the trees.

I’d like to be a birch tree. Or an oak. When something moves me, I feel as gentle and innocent as a birch. I’d like to also be an oak. It has a wonderful form, a giant, that enormity, the abundance of leaves. There’s an oak like this near my home. But to tell you the truth – each tree is beautiful because it’s different.”

 

photo: Paweł Fabjański

text: Anna Kaplińska

Watch video here 

Tomasz Stańko

“As a teenager, I had one dream – to perform with Komeda. And it came true. And then I played with the best and everything came to me so naturally. I never formulated the mechanism for dreaming within myself – because all my dreams would come true. Because for me, to dream is to live (…) I make it come true by living. Just like that. I don’t have an inclination for dreaming. It’s not important to me (laughs…). Music is an abstract form of art, it doesn’t need words. I live and create in abstraction. What I do is very fleeting and unnamed. Music is a kind of dreaming.”

 

photo: Anna Grzelewska

text: Anna Kaplińska

Watch video here 

Zbigniew Libera

“Over the past few years, I’ve most wanted to be a hermit. There are these monasteries, where I’d like to lock myself up in. I was once in a Christian Orthodox monastery in Israel. You have to walk through the desert for a long time to get there. It’s called Koziba and it is sculpted out of the rock in the middle of the desert outside of Jerusalem. The monks spend their time in caves. They go in and never come back. They pull food up on a rope. They set a basket out and if it’s there, it means that person is alive. If it isn’t, they are not. I often think about these hermits, living in the desert, eating crickets.”

 

photo: Jacek Poremba

text: Anna Kaplińska

Ks. Adam Boniecki

“My earliest memory desire of possessing something material was the desire to own… a cane. No, I had no trouble walking. Back then, there was a fashion for walking with cane. Any respectable, distinguished adult would walk with a cane. I suspect I simply wanted to be an adult and because you can’t rush these things, I dreamed of looking like an adult. One of my aunts even promised to being me a coveted cane from Warsaw. But nothing came of it. All she brought me was a toy, which was idiotic (because it was meant for a child).”

 

collage: Dorota Buczkowska

text: Janusz Głowacki

Watch video here 

Janusz Głowacki

“It’s obvious that for a six-year-old boy, his Mother is the Universe. My mother held sway over nature – she could scatter the clouds whenever she wanted to. I am sure I was a timid boy because I would ask her to turn me into a lion. She said that it wouldn’t be a problem, but she wasn’t sure if she could turn me back again. I was on the fence. Sometimes she would scare me by saying that when I grew up, I would leave her. I would promise her that I wouldn’t marry anyone – and if I did, then it would only be with her. I think she liked to hear it. Of course, there was something Freudian in all of it…”

photo: Jacek Poremba

text: Anna Kaplińska

Jerzy Pilch

“Mine is not named Monica or Sharon or Cindy. But perhaps Lev. I didn’t dream of Sharon Stone but Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. (…) Tolstoy was difficult but… perhaps I should just come out and say it because it’s already pretty clear. My unfulfilled dream, but the one that will never come true because I will never get my Russian on such a level, would be to translate and publish, with my own commentary, ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’. I am afraid, however, that I won’t ever do it and I accept it, with a certain melancholy.”

You wrote a story on Tolstoy and chess, titled ‘The Doppelganger of Tolstoy’s Nephew’.

“The starting point for this short story is a picture that I came across ten years ago, with all of Tolstoy’s family huddled around a chessboard.”

This photograph and the chess game made it so that through your story, you have painted a genius portrait of your own family. In particular, your father…

“Yes. You might say that Tolstoy was very useful to me.”

 

photo: Bernard Kwapiński

text: Alicja Resich-Modlińska

Janusz Majewski

“I tried to play the trumpet. When I was making a film in what was then Czechoslovakia, I had plenty of korunas left and I didn’t know what to do with them, so I bought myself a trumpet. Tomasz Stańko, when I showed it to him, was surprised that I’d managed to get such a good one. It was a jazz piston trumpet. So, I thought that when I have a bit of time, I’d start learning to play it. First, when I was still in Zoliborz (in Warsaw), where I lived, I tried but I saw how nervous the neighbours were, so I put it away. Then we moved to Mazury (the Lake District), so I thought: now, I’ll be able to develop my talent here! I started to learn the trumpet then and there would be dogs coming over from all around and barking, so I couldn’t go on. So, in the end, I never learned to play an instrument.”

photo: Bernard Kwapiński

text: Alicja Resich-Modlińska

Jerzy Stuhr

“This is a dream that I talk about a bit parenthetically, it’s tightly correlated to my pursuit of freedom, which is limited by what I do for a living. The theatre expects me to be an artist at 7:00 or the film, with seven trucks heading for the set and the whole set-up depends on so many people. But when I take my pen and I sit before a sheet of paper, I feel free. […] I didn’t have the courage to go into fiction. Maybe it’s all ahead of me. I’m winding it around in my head all the time.”

 

 

photo: Bernard Kwapiński

text: Olga Wiechnik

Watch video here 

Boris Kudlicka

“From the start, it was the Trabant [a brand of car]. The flying one – an element of the set, which I saw at a U2 concert – and my own – renovated with my own hands.”

Boris Kudlička, the screenwriter with a bunch of awards, recalls his dreams of being a car mechanic and buys a Trabant in his first year of college.

“The deluxe version”, he says with pride. “It’s different from the basic model because of the fog lights in the back and the check pattern of the defroster on the back window. We painted it the colour of a beer bottle, a brown one, with a friend. Add gold fenders, gold floor mats, aluminium trims spray-painted gold.” 

photo: Bernard Kwapiński

text: Alicja Resich-Modlinska

Watch video here 

Beata Tyszkiewicz

“A dream I would like to see fulfilled would be to be a regular woman. I think that everyone would think: But an actress should have exceptional dreams. She should dream about playing Gertrude in ‘Hamlet’ or even ‘Antigone’. And surprisingly, I want to be what I’m most proud of – a woman who takes care of her home. I’m quite entertained by the observation that it doesn’t fit in with my ‘image’. My idea still sparks surprise. […] I have always been isolated from the assumptions people make about me. Everyday life has so much beauty in it and that’s what I find most interesting. That’s what I wanted to show in this image.”

photo: Pszemek Dzienis

text: Anna Kaplińska

Watch video here 

Anda Rottenberg

"We were supposed to talk about dreams, but we will be talking about…”

Death. […] For some time, I have been witnessing different people in my circle of loved ones passing on. Some of them have been subject to great suffering, and if they die in the hospital, the doctors torture them with additional treatments that are meant to keep them alive – because it is in line with their ethics or worldview. […] Death is never good. People are very afraid and so, they push away their thoughts on it, and then they aren’t able to organise a decent passing for themselves. I wouldn’t want to die in this way. I believe, in spite of what one certain prayer says, that sudden death is a salvation. Especially in the case of people who are active and wouldn’t want to change their position from vertical to horizontal for the last few years of their lives. I wouldn’t want to. So, this is the sort of dream I have.

photo: Iza Grzybowska

text: Alicja Resich-Modlińska

Watch video here 

Daniel Olbrychski

"Your acting career has progressed in a way that sometimes you didn’t even have a chance to dream, and you already had the role: Rafał Olbromski, Kmicic, Azja Tuchajbejowicz, Hamlet. The offers came before the dreams of a young actor. Is this still the case?

“In some way, yes. I always dreamed of playing a role in an American western. […] If only it could happen before the only role I can play is the sheriff in a wheelchair because I can’t get on a horse anymore. […] Truly, from the beginning, my historical idol was Zawisza the Black. And Winnetou is a native Zawisza the Black. Someone who can’t be beat, unbreakable and just. Winnetou never killed anyone, it wasn’t necessary.”

 

photo: Igor Omulecki

text: Anna Kaplińska

Watch video here 

Krzysztof Pastor

“I never dreamed of fame. It wasn’t a category that I was interested in, and many of us dancers, we never thought about great fame. It never seemed possible to us. […] But I do remember that I had these flashes and I still have them now, that it is a beautiful thing, a really beautiful thing to be a conductor. It might seem strange but hidden in this there is the need to develop an ability that has been unknown to me up to this point […]. I’m drawn by a certain logic that a composer needs to have but I also see, or rather, I hear how much the sound of the music depends on who they are as a person. I dream of being a conductor who leads an orchestra that is capable of captivating the audience.”

 

photo: Kasia Bielska

text: Anna Kaplińska

Watch video here 

Aleksandra Kurzak

“Ever since I was a child, I was deliriously in love with the ballet. Perhaps that’s because when I was very young, my parents would take me to the opera for ballet performances for children. […] I loved ‘Swan Lake’ and ‘Giselle’. I often couldn’t stay in my seat – I’d get up during a performance and, in the box, between the rows, I’d dance some of the parts. The confused spectators would look at me in astonishment and laugh. And I just really wanted to dance… I even got pointe shoes from a friend of my mothers. When they would come to our home, they would pick me up, teach me to pirouette. Sometimes I would wear my feet down until they bled, and I couldn’t stop dancing.”

photo: Kobas Laksa

text: Bogusław Deptuła

Watch video here

Edward Dwurnik

“Of course, I wanted to be like Mick Jagger, especially since we’re born in the same year. Obviously, I was at their concert in Warsaw and I mean the first one, because there were two. It was truly an incredible experience. We were sitting somewhere far up but I had a cool set of binoculars. And for the first time, I experienced the loudness of a concert sound system. They had a great deal of power then. And I could feel like destiny’s child. In Warsaw, the Stones were twentysomethings, and they were awesome.”

photo: Kuba Dąbrowski

text: Anna Kaplińska

Watch video here

Jaś Mela

“ […] It may not sound very politically correct but as a child, I also dreamed of being a soldier. I didn’t want to run around with a rifle, but I imagined myself crawling around an incredibly tropical place. I just loved the jungle. A few times, I had the chance to spend some time in the jungle. I was fascinated by the Hollywood cinema of war, which mostly dealt with Vietnam. My favourite film is ‘Apocalypse Now’ and my favourite book is ‘Heart of Dearkness’. […] I am fascinated in this book by the revealing of truth, the secrets of human nature – strange and often cruel. All these films about Vietnam show the absurdity of war, the absurdity of killing, but also the clash of the western world with an entirely different way of thinking.”

photo: Monika Kmita

text: Anna Kaplińska

Watch video here

Alicja Resich- Modlińska

“I don’t believe in fairies. Nor witches or other supernatural forces. Everything that is a driver of change, that drives or doesn’t drive us is inside of us as human beings. We also have imagination, fantasies and hope. So, I would say that I have a great hope that fairies do actually exist. It’s like with God – I hope God exists. If it turns out God exists – I’ll accept it with delight. Meanwhile, I’m just indulging in the fantasy….”

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