Witkacy & Malinowski: a cinematic séance in 23 scenes

An “experimental docudrama” that recreates a real-life argument between two great Polish thinkers on a train to Toowoomba. Haunted by the recent suicide of his lover, the artist and visionary playwright Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz(known as Witkacy) took a train through the Australian countryside in 1914 with his friend, the rationalist anthropologist Bronisław Kasper Malinowski. WWI had just been declared, and the pair have a heated, friendship-ending argument about the political, the personal, and the power of rationality versus the transcendent power of art. Intercut with the drama unfolding on the train are scenes from Witkacy’s own avant-garde play The Crazy Locomotive, as both the speeding train and the relationship between the two friends hurtle inevitably towards disaster.