BIMA in Hebrew stands for “scene”. In 2022, students of directing faculty at the Theater Academy in Warsaw will produce three diploma performances as part of BIMA program in cooperation with the Jewish Theater in Warsaw. On behalf of the Theater Academy, the artistic supervision of the project will be provided by Łukasz Chotkowski, and on behalf of the Jewish Theater, by its director, Gołda Tencer. The literary supervision for BIMA is provided by Remigiusz Grzela.

Based on the short story by Irit Amiel, a Jewish poet and writer who survived the Holocaust and died on February 16, 2021, the first of the diploma productions “Debts” will premiere on February 11, 2022, at the BIMA stage in Warsaw at Senatorska Street 35.

During her lifetime, Irit Amiel wrote about the Holocaust survivors like her. In “Debts” she tells viewers her own story. According to Amiel, the dead usually do what they used to do when alive. In her short story “Debts”, a several-page sketch of her relationship with Rafał, he is the writer’s guide through the land of her death. Saved from a transport to a death camp as a boy, he is a man who does not know how to live with the awareness of the past. In the Afterlife, Irit and Rafał lost their Jewish souls and undertake a joint journey through life.

Karolina Kowalczyk, the director and Natalia Królak, the screenwriter both say that the story “Debts” is an intimate portrait of the pain of the survivors. “With no drastic images, no dazzling with violence, it is a story about what is life. It is an attempt to inspect the values that constitute a human life. It puts also a question of what happens to a person who lost his footing. After death, no longer existing persons can make up their lives again and again. After all, they cannot be more dead. Maybe quite the opposite, they will live for a while longer”.

Adrian Andrzejewski