Before you were born - A Polish film-maker fights against religious homophobia

Ania Łada and Mateusz Deskiewicz in Before You Were Born directed by musician and composer Josué Mastroianni

IN POLAND, dozens of small towns have declared themselves free of ‘LGBT ideology’. Politicians' hostility to LGBT+ rights has become a flashpoint, pitting the religious right against more liberal-minded Poles. And LGBT+ people living in these areas are faced with a choice: emigrate, keep their heads down - or fight back.

Andi from Open Table Warrington shares a Polish film-maker’s response.

Before you were born is a new short film in English and Polish starring Ania Łada and Mateusz Deskiewicz. Directed by musician and composer Josué Mastroianni, Before you were born addresses important issues about tolerance and love, as well as the role religion can play both for better and for worse in shaping societal responses to LGBT+ inclusion.

Specifically, the film deals with issues surrounding acceptance when a young man (Deskiewicz) comes out to his stubborn and mother (Łada). It is based on real-life experience of an unnamed Polish gay man, but all of us who have experienced religious prejudice on the basis of our sexual orientation will be able to identify with Deskiewicz’s character.

The ten minute film begins with the man’s mother struggling to accept the reality of his sexual orientation. While we do not hear what he says when he comes out – the film starts off with an awkward 40-second silence – her first words are ‘you can’t be serious’. The young man is not entirely surprised (‘ I knew... you’d react like this’ he responds) and clearly the two have had conversations in the past although he’s waited a long time to tell his mother the truth.

The mother argues that her son’s orientation is ‘against nature’, while he expresses frustrations about his parents’ attitudes in the past. He complains they were ‘always telling me that I’m a sinner’ and suggests they see him as a ‘disease’. However, he sees his parents’ views as an expression of their religious understandings and his criticisms are religious, not personal.

The son makes the point that he didn’t choose his life or his orientation and tells his mother that ‘no-one volunteers for this’. Why would anyone make a choice to be treated as ‘inferior, unequal, dirty [or] twisted’? But he maintains his orientation has been ‘given to me’ and puts forward a religious argument of his own: God does not make mistakes. He quotes Jeremiah 1:5, and tells his mother that God ‘shaped my spirit’ and chose her body to be ‘the temple in which my little spirit would be conceived’.

When his mother urges him to ‘keep praying’, her son affirms that he ‘gave [his] heart to Jesus’ and contrasts the supposed ‘sin’ of his orientation with other sins that seems trouble society (and his mother) less: ‘drunkenness, manslaughter, lying, betrayal’. The young man says that he has found another man - who is also a Christian - with whom he wants to share his life, but the church has rejected them.

The young man asks his mother whether she has considered that the whole purpose of his life - and other ‘mistakes’ - is that God set them apart for the purpose of testing how society will treat them. He criticises those who ‘make us suffer through their words and actions’, and the implication is that this is not how God wants his people to live. The theology is laid on thick and fast, and it feels rather preachy at times. The dialogue doesn’t always feel like an authentic coming out conversation, but its political, religious and cultural context is key.

In present-day Poland the ruling party in government, the Law and Justice Party (PiS), supported by key figures within the Catholic Church, has used the language of ‘disease’ and ‘inferiority’ to demonise the LGBT+ community. The anti-LGBT+ rhetoric goes to the top of the party including Prime Minister Andrzej Duda, who has overseen the creation of ‘LGBT free zones’ and used fearmongering against LGBT+ people to his political advantage. The PiS’s divisive politics and its appeal  to conservative values (including motherhood) are clearly Mastroianni’s targets; the discourse between the characters is therefore not only personal but a political and religious commentary that happens to focus on a family’s struggles to make its broader points.

The film concludes with the mother embracing and caressing her son. She does not speak, but we are left to imagine that her son’s appeal to God’s love and a more inclusive way of looking at the world has had an effect. The self-evident lesson is that Poland - and the church - needs to respond as she has. The film’s essential message is that another world, another Poland, and another church are possible. All it takes is love.

The film is in English and Polish, and frequently switches between the two languages for no obvious reason, which is both confusing and unnecessary as it is subtitled in whichever of the two languages is not being spoken at the time. To my mind it would have felt more authentic had the dialogue been entirely in Polish, with English subtitles for the benefit of a more international audience.

It is not the words that speak the loudest, however. Mastroianni’s haunting and evocative music score, accompanied by the acting skills of Łada and Deskiewicz, urge us to think seriously about the very nature of love. The sometimes fraught dialogue between the characters is framed by an opening 40 seconds and a closing minute in which no words are uttered at all. The contrast between the mother’s expressions in the opening scene and her outpouring of love in the final one is striking.

While Before you were born contains a message for all of us, especially those of us for whom our understandings have been shaped by conservative theology, it is first and foremost a courageous attempt to challenge the direction of the political conversation in Poland. I hope it is widely viewed and empowers others to use creative media in similar ways. Deskiewicz and Łada, both well-known actors in Poland, deserve credit for associating themselves with the film’s inclusive message.

It is concerning to note that, in the days immediately following the release of Before you were born, the director Josué Mastroianni’s website has been taken offline. This underlines the dangers of resisting the PiS’s divisive populism and the obligation those of us living outside Poland have to support its LGBT+ community at a time of oppression and victimisation.

WATCH Before you were born [10 mins]