MS Slavic 7

Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell’s MS SLAVIC 7 is an odd kind of detective story – one in which the quiet, contemplative process of archival research and its attendant institutional protocols become the material for wry comedy, awkward family politics, and ruminative abstractions on the nature of communication and intellectual labor. Reprising her role as Audrey Benac from Bohdanowicz’s NEVER EAT ALONE and VESLEMØY’S SONG, Campbell draws on elements of her co-director’s family history. Floating between the venerable halls of Harvard University’s Houghton Library and Cambridge’s adjacent bars and hotel rooms – distilled here into a series of discrete minimalist settings – Audrey seeks out the archived correspondence between her great-grandmother and a young poet, both Polish refugees who migrated to North America after the Second World War. Suggesting the observational clarity of documentary through precisely compositional framing and spare onscreen text, the film traces Audrey’s determined and solipsistic passage through the archive’s administrative procedures, material and emotional encounters, and intellectual reveries. (Leo Goldsmith)

In the presence of Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell.