Balladyna: A classic Polish play is now being adapted by an Oscar-nominated director

"Balladyna" is a Polish classic, a play assigned to students around the country to read for school. Now, the 19th-century work is to be put on screen by Jan Komasa, an Oscar-nominated director from Poland.

One of the key works of Polish Romanticism, “Balladyna” focuses on the rise and eventual fall of a Slavic queen, who becomes overwhelmed by the pursuit of power.

Often compared to the tragedy of Macbeth, the play, authored by Polish Romantic poet Juliusz Słowacki, criticizes ruthless human nature and warns against the corruptive nature of unchecked ambition.

Balladyna, the future evil queen, begins as a common girl living in a forest hut with her sister and mother. Through various cunning machinations, she eventually finds a way to marry the king and find herself on the throne. The price for her sudden rise to power is the brutal killing of her sister, Alina, which leaves Balladyna with a permanent red stain on her forehead, which she is unable to remove.

While Balladyna often engages in acts of extreme violence, she is panged with nightmares, regret, and signs that she is more complex than her actions alone can show. Rather than being a psychopath born with no ability to empathize, she is instead characterized as flawed, but human. And it is some of her most human qualities that are the most terrifying.

“The earth is the mad mother of madmen,” a hermit, and one of the characters of the play, remarks in one of his lines, emphasizing that not only the queen, but the world that she lives in, are full of complexity and chaos.

It is exactly this world, full to the brim with all of its madmen, magic, and evil queens, that Oscar-nominated director Jan Komasa hopes to put to stage.

Who is Jan Komasa?

Komasa is perhaps best known for his 2019 film Corpus Christi, which was nominated for Best International Feature Film in 2020. The film, much like his newest project, focuses on the complexities of human nature.

In Corpus Christi, Komasa follows the journey of Daniel, a convict in a Polish prison serving a sentence for second-degree murder. After being assigned to work in a village sawmill, Daniel escapes and poses as a Catholic priest, bringing his unconventional approach to the local parishioners. Daniel’s character doesn’t fall neatly into the traditional lines of “good” and “evil”, nor can he be classified as meeting the Catholic standards of morality.

Similarly, although "Balladyna" shares some tropes with fairy tales that have clear morals and lessons, her character is not as simple as that of the evil queen. Yes, Balladyna grasps on to power at all costs, but she is not without her own nuances and complexities.

Catholicism challenged

Aside from difficult questions about identity and morality, Komasa’s works, as well as his latest planned film, ask specific questions about Polish identity. In a country currently grappling with generational differences regarding Catholicism, Corpus Cristi asks what it means to be a “good” Catholic in the modern world.

Aside from the themes of power and the depravity it can come with, "Balladyna" has strong motifs of nature, and the mystical forest in which we first meet the future queen is a character of its own. The wilderness of the forest reflects the similar wildness of human nature, and infuses an element of traditional Slavic mythology into the work.

The film is being made thanks to a new partnership between Jan Komasa and the production company Aurun Film. Both parties signed an agreement for long-term cooperation, the company announced on Friday.

The agreement states that Komasa "will focus on his own film concepts, which will then be developed into full scripts with Aurum Film as the leading producer at all stages of creating each of the titles".

"The first project created under the signed agreement will be a new version of 'Balladyna' based on Juliusz Słowacki's drama, realized in the Gothic horror convention,” Aurun Film wrote in a statement.

According to Komasa, this is the beginning of a new chapter. "The opportunity to focus on creation, without the pressure of searching for optimal working conditions, is priceless,” he said.