Joanna Rydzewska

Swansea University | SWAN

This chapter studies the BBC/PBS coproduction World on Fire (2019–present) as an example of new high-end transnational television drama that foregrounds cultural specificity as a means to target an international audience. The chapter explores ways in which the first season of WoF inscribes Polish cultural specificity to address viewers dispersed ac...

The Office for National Statistics estimates that between December 2003 and June 2009 the Polish-born population of the United Kingdom increased from 75,000 to 503,000. These statistics provide a contextual background for Shane Meadows' Somers Town (2008), a film which portrays a British teenager, Tomo (Thomas Turgoose) who befriends a young Polish...

Following the 2004 extension of the European Union, vast numbers of Polish migrant workers arrived in the United Kingdom. Two British films released in 2008 – Shane Meadows' Somers Town and Steven Sheil's Mum and Dad – were a response to this. This article will explore the way the two films rework and negotiate collective sentiments concerning the...

Following the 2004 extension of the European Union (EU), Polish migrant workers began arriving in the United Kingdom on an unprecedented scale. Londyńczycy/Londoners (2008-9) was a response to this. Exploring the lives of Polish migrants in London, the series became an instant success on Polish television, regularly attracting around four million v...

From a gendered perspective, Alumbramiento is a traditional Oedipal scenario. However, in spite of the supposed ahistoricism of its Freudian overtones, they could and should be read as having profoundly social implications. If, on the individual level of one family, the film explores the death of the matriarch and the emotional and practical impact...

This article will look at the way in which the thematic and aesthetic discourses of My Summer of Love imagine and problematize the notion of a British/English identity. As an allegorical story of Sapphic love and conflict between two teenage girls, working-class Mona and upper-class Tamsin, My Summer of Love explores an English identity by mapping...

The collapse of the Communist regimes in 1989 and the 2004 and 2007 extensions of the European Union to include several Eastern European countries have suddenly changed the Iron Curtain coexistence of West and East into East/West literal encounters in Europe. It is these changes in population, pan-European encounters and a redefined notion of Europ...

The present paper by looking at two Polish films featuring foreign women, Do widzenia, do jutra /Good Bye, Till Tomorrow (Morgenstern 1960) and Trzy Kolory: Biay/Three Colours: White (Kielowski 1993), analyses the ways in which the gendered metaphorical representation of the main characters probes into the questions of Polish identity and its relat...