Unfinished Time: The Poems of Father Jan Twardowski

The Quiet Geometry of Grace

I’ve often thought that filming poetry is a fool’s errand. The medium of film is inherently muscular—it wants to move, to cut, to show you the world in motion—whereas a poem, particularly the work of Father Jan Twardowski, prefers to sit still and turn a pebble over in its hand until you notice the light catching its edge. How do you adapt that?

You don't, really. You have to let it breathe.

In Unfinished Time, director Dariusz Gajewski avoids the standard, dusty trap of the biographical documentary. He doesn’t treat Twardowski as a monument to be circled or a subject to be dissected. Instead, he treats the priest's poetry as a kind of atmospheric pressure, something that settles over the everyday lives of the people on screen.

It’s a bold choice to strip away the narrator’s ego and let the poems—and the people living them—occupy the foreground.

The film lives or dies on the strength of its voice, and here, that voice belongs to Anna Seniuk. There is a texture to her delivery that I found difficult to look away from—a gravelly, lived-in quality that suggests she isn’t just reciting lines, but recalling conversations she’s already had with the world. She doesn’t declaim the poetry with the artificial grandeur one usually hears in high-brow literary adaptations.