By Mónica Delgado

In Scaffold, Kazik Radwanski affirms himself as a filmmaker interested in working with details out of field, using them as a social radiography. Shots of fragments are shot to give testimony about the situation of migrant workers in a Canadian suburb, where beyond the empathy between the “outsiders” and the “people of the inside”, an assembly of a dispositive of close ups of hands and actions is proposed, to avoid faces and gestures.

Radwanski proposes, from the story of two men of Balkan origin (repair workers) a protocol of relations with landlords and hiring people, especially with women, that appear inside their houses, peeking in the windows to give some indications or to offer coffee. Hence, this inside/outside thing turns into an analogy for the uprooting or an incomplete insertion in the quotidian. Through these social codes, the filmmaker builds a sensitivity around the point of view of a migrant, where does he sees from, the instability, a place where commentary about the daily journal in the neighborhood helps to draw a quiet journey of work.

In this working universe, stable while its apparatus manages to sustain it, the actions of hands are what makes sense of it all. Like in Bresson’s cinema, the hands define the characters, what they are and what they perceive from these movements. Except here that’s only in the field of work, in shots that never show them in full. We guess their faces, their gestures, their looks towards the questions or answers of the people that hire them. This soul that appears through the hands doesn’t have the sublimation of yesterday, like ambassadors of certain spirituality. They now draw these contained forms of relation, programmatic, of kind worlds that are never mixed, ruled by the norms of work and its conventions.

Radwanski builds in this short film of 15 minutes, a throughout study of migration, from its forms and codes, of its necessary contention and diplomacy in a new world. The scaffolds seen and sensed as a precarious and momentary platform, unstable, become a metaphor of the home you make for yourself, a home that is elevated to allow us to see the environment, just to achieve some possibility of equality.

Director: Kazik Radwanski
Script: Kazik Radwanski
Producers: Daniel Montgomery, Nikolay Michaylov, Kazik Radwanski
Cinematography: Nikolay Michaylov
Sound, Music, Editing: Ajla Odobasic
Cast: Jasmin Geljo, igor Drijaca, Nicole Fairbairn
Canada, 2017