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In the Valley of the Gods In the Valley of the Gods
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Fiction

In the Valley of the Gods

An Interview with Lech Majewski
Jan Pelczar
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time 11 minutes
Jan Pelczar:
A journalist from Radio RAM. Author of the book 'Lecę. Piloci mi to powiedzieli' ('I'm Flying. Pilots Told Me That'). A graduate of the Polish School of Reportage. Associated with 'Przekrój' magazine since forever. In childhood, he flipped through all the editions at his grandparents'. In adulthood, he became addicted to the crossword puzzles of the Kaliber 45 collective and the drawings of Raczkowski.

The scenic and sublime Monument Valley, part of the Colorado Plateau, lies within the territory of the Navajo Nation Reservation. The Valley of the Gods, located to the north of Monument Valley, is part of the same geological system and a vast natural temple sacred to the Navajo. It is also where Lech Majewski shot his last film.

I spoke with Lech Majewski at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia after the premiere of Valley of the Gods. The latest film by the man behind Life Hurts and The Mill and the Cross was finally shown in Polish cinemas after having been delayed by the pandemic. The movie draws from an ancient legend of the Navajo, whose gods live inside the rock formations of the titular valley.

Jan Pelczar: From the first few takes of Valley of the Gods, the audience is hypnotized by the captivating vistas you found within the Navajo territory.

Lech Majewski: My films take a long time to be made. The valley inhabited by the Navajo has fascinated me for years. And the idea behind this film has been budding and growing for an equally long time. Towards the end of the 1980s, in collaboration with David Lynch’s Propaganda Films, I started pre-production on the movie that would become Gospel According to Harry. We originally intended to shoot it in the desert, somewhere in the western part of the United States. I was appointed a guide, or rather a location scout, with whom I traveled across probably all the deserts in this region of America. We drove over 8000 kilometres. I simply didn’t know which desert to choose. I showed Lynch a fragment of my earlier film, The Knight, that we’d shot among the white sand dunes near Łeba in northern Poland. He loved it and that’s basically why we shot Gospel there. But my strange and wonderful ramble across the deserts of the western US was

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Jan Pelczar:
A journalist from Radio RAM. Author of the book 'Lecę. Piloci mi to powiedzieli' ('I'm Flying. Pilots Told Me That'). A graduate of the Polish School of Reportage. Associated with 'Przekrój' magazine since forever. In childhood, he flipped through all the editions at his grandparents'. In adulthood, he became addicted to the crossword puzzles of the Kaliber 45 collective and the drawings of Raczkowski.
Translation: Karolina Sofulak
Publish date: 18.09.2020

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Aboriginal peoples on Palm Island, Queensland, 1930. Source: Fairfax Media via Getty Images
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Jan Pelczar
Jan Pelczar:
A journalist from Radio RAM. Author of the book 'Lecę. Piloci mi to powiedzieli' ('I'm Flying. Pilots Told Me That'). A graduate of the Polish School of Reportage. Associated with 'Przekrój' magazine since forever. In childhood, he flipped through all the editions at his grandparents'. In adulthood, he became addicted to the crossword puzzles of the Kaliber 45 collective and the drawings of Raczkowski.

Palm Island is where, for many years, Australians were sending Aboriginal peoples. The shark-infested waters surrounding the island served as a natural barrier, stopping the prisoners from escaping it, explains traveller Bartosz Twaróg in conversation with Jan Pelczar.

I meet Bartosz Twaróg in a bookstore in Wrocław Market Square. He has just come back from a weekend spent in the nearby Owl Mountains. “It was a post-climate catastrophe landscape,” he tells me. We are going to talk about a place marked just as harshly by human activity as it was by natural disasters. The island’s location by the shores of Australia should be enough for us not to confuse its name with the artificial archipelago on the coast of the United Arab Emirates.

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