Julia Sipowicz misses Poland. The pandemic has meant the Polish national hasn’t been able to visit Poland and see family and friends. Instead, she has found herself frequenting Greenpoint. “I go there all the time to pick up tea and juice that I would get home. I’ve kind of found a temporary kind of solace there,” she says.
This spring, Sipowicz, a senior at NYU, will be independently filming a short film called Sour Times in both Polish and English. The film is about loss, Sipowicz says, and will consist of three vignettes: a girl and her father find a dead pigeon, a pair of siblings wait for their father’s passing, and a girl washes her lover’s hair. “They are all punctuated by really primal rituals of ingestion and cleanliness,” Sipowicz says.
The second vignette is about Sipowicz’s grandfather and will be filmed in Greenpoint and in Polish. Currently, Sipowicz is looking for Polish speaking actors to fill a few parts. She has tacked English and Polish flyers to sign posts around Greenpoint and says she’s already gotten a positive response from community members. “One woman congratulated me for the effort and another said she was proud of me,” Sipowicz says. But she still needs actors.
Sipowicz is currently looking for a Polish speaking man and woman, both between ages 40 and 60, to play siblings.
If you are interested, send your name, age, contact information and a photo of yourself to Sipowicz at jis340@nyu.edu. Shooting is expected to start in mid-March and will follow strict COVID safety guidelines, according to the flyer, posted below. The position is unpaid.
