Participating artists:Assaf Gruber (Director, Screenplay) with Abdelkader Lagtaâ, Marta Ojrzynska, Mateusz Górski, Dagmara Bąk
29', Germany, Austria 2025, colour & black & white, Polish, English, subtitles: English
The transtemporal film Miraculous Accident tells the love story between Nadir, a Moroccan student at the film school in Łódź, Poland in 1968, his Jewish editing lecturer Edyta and their relationship with Jarek, Nadir's best friend and Edyta's protégé. Nadir belongs to a group of North African students who were sent to study communist film techniques as part of the Eastern Bloc's support for anti-imperialist struggles. Despite her rejection of Zionism, Edyta is urged to leave Poland due to the political rift between Poland and Israel after the Six-Day War, also known as An-Naksa, "The Setback". After finding a lost letter from Edyta that she had written to him from Haifa in 1989, Nadir returns to film school in 2024 to make a film.
The film mourns the cruelty of nations that produce rare miracles - accidental love affairs - only to shatter them before they even begin to breathe. Miraculous Accident is inspired in part by the life of filmmaker Abdelkader Lagtaâ, who plays the role of Nadir in the film, and interweaves its plot with clips from 1960s student films made by Lagtaâ and his fellow students.
Assaf Gruber lives and works as a sculptor and filmmaker in Berlin. His work focuses on the dynamic relationship between individuals and institutions, examining both how the political orientation of institutions influences the lives of individuals and the way in which these organisations represent and communicate facts and their artefacts. The absurd biographies of the protagonists of his projects both reveal and conceal the reasons and motives that lead people to obey or rebel against their inner world or the society in which they live. His photographs, sculptures and installations relate the materiality of the objects to narrative dimensions, which in turn create fictitious spaces in which movement and stasis function as a medium.
