What We Do in Isolation: Life in Lockdown
at Ilusion Cinema, the Museum of Film Art of the National Film Archive–Audiovisual Institute (FINA), Warsaw
Autumn 2020
● Curating
The COVID-19 lockdown radically reshaped our everyday existence. Forced into domestic isolation, many were cut off not only from their routines but from structures of care, support, and labor. For some, confinement offered a pause—a time for reflection, rest, or creative retreat. For others, it deepened precarity, exposing long-standing inequalities and systemic fragilities. What appeared at first to be a collective experience quickly fractured along lines of class, race, gender, and geography.
As time lost shape and uncertainty grew, people found different ways to cope. Some turned inward, constructing protective cocoons. Others encountered disorientation, loneliness, or the slow creep of psychological unravelling. Isolation was not only physical—it became existential.
The protagonists of our October film program live through similar states of suspension. Trapped in rooms, routines, or their own minds, they confront fear, repetition, and the disintegration of meaning. Their inner worlds expand, distort, and occasionally implode. These are not simply stories of being "stuck indoors," but of what happens when time collapses, social roles dissolve, and selfhood becomes unstable.
What do we become when the frameworks that define us disappear? What haunts us in solitude? What fantasies or nightmares emerge when the outside world is no longer accessible?
In this program, we will explore cinematic portraits of psychological confinement, internal collapse, and existential solitude
① Conversation Piece (Luchino Visconti, 1974) — A quiet yet emotionally charged story of a retired professor whose solitary life is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of a young couple and their entourage. The film explores how intrusion reshapes space, memory, and self-perception.
② The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, 1962) — A surrealist satire in which a group of dinner guests find themselves mysteriously unable to leave the room. As days pass, social masks fall away, exposing human desperation beneath bourgeois rituals.
③ Hour of the Wolf (Ingmar Bergman, 1968) — A disturbing journey into the mind of an artist plagued by insomnia, nightmares, and creative torment. Obsession, isolation, and blurred realities converge in a haunting exploration of madness.
④ Hunger (Henning Carlsen, 1966) — A stark adaptation of Knut Hamsun’s novel about a destitute writer wandering Oslo, slipping between reality and hallucination as hunger, pride, and despair consume him. With a spare aesthetic and a haunting score by Krzysztof Komeda.
⑤ The Tenant (Roman Polanski, 1976) — A chilling descent into paranoia and identity loss. After renting an apartment in which the previous tenant attempted suicide, a man begins to lose his grip on reality, haunted by both his neighbors and his own reflection.
⑥ Lord of the Flies (Peter Brook, 1963) — A brutal allegory of civilization and chaos, in which a group of boys stranded on an island attempt to build their own society—with disturbing results. A powerful meditation on fear, group dynamics, and survival.
⑦ Three Colours: Blue (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1993) — After losing her husband and child in an accident, a woman withdraws from life in an attempt to sever all emotional ties. But isolation brings its own challenges, and the past refuses to stay buried. A meditation on grief and the ambiguity of freedom.
⑧ Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid, 1943) — A cornerstone of American avant-garde cinema, this short film uses dream logic and symbolic imagery to trace a woman’s fragmented inner world. Keys, knives, and mirrors multiply, reflecting a struggle for self-definition in isolation.
These films map the emotional and philosophical contours of confinement—where the domestic sphere becomes a stage for collapse, where solitude amplifies unrest, and where the boundary between self and world begins to blur.
This October, we invite you to explore what remains when we are left alone with ourselves. In the wake of a global event that exposed the fault lines of our societies and our psyches, these films remind us that isolation is never neutral—and never the same for everyone.