“If you’re not desperate with the cards you have been dealt, you live a comfortable and predictable life, you don’t risk, you don’t test your limits, you don’t need to look for creative ways to change your stars.”

The Warner brothers had been desperate and because of that, they lived lives of adventures, challenges, collapses, successes, and failures. And they put all this experience into the stories they were telling and selling to their audiences,” says filmmaker Paweł Ferdek, whose latest documentary Pollywood explores the widely unknown and surprisingly Poland-centric beginnings of the greatest dream factory of them all: Hollywood.

Dariusz Kuźma: How did you first find out about early Hollywood’s moguls being from Poland?

Paweł Ferdek: Long story short, it all started when my journalist friend asked for help in deciding whether to pursue a certain idea for a documentary project. It concerned the oldest Polish film, Prussian Culture, and led us on a journey through the first attempts at establishing a movie industry in Poland. The film’s producer, Mordechai Towbin, was quite a character, a larger-than-life figure who combined patriotic messages and populist undertones in his films. He reached the top, got under many people’s skin and . . . disappeared. To this day, no one knows what happened to him. I speculated jokingly that he had probably escaped across the ocean with a suitcase full of money, changed his name and started to make films. Then my friend told me about this book, Pollywood by Andrzej Krakowski, that shed some light on