Today I will take you on a trip to two continents and to two places almost 10,000 km apart.
The first one is in Poland. It’s the city of Sopot, on the Baltic Sea coast. Canadian Polish photographer 
and film personality Ela Kinowska now lives there. For over four decades she has been involved in film, photography and cultural animation. In fact, we featured her on Polcast before – in Episode 40 “Two Polish Canadians’ gift for Canada’s 150th birthday” about the famous red couch with which Ela and her project partner Piotr Sobierajski travelled across Canada, from coast to coast, and sat various people on the couch, asking what Canada means to them. Today, I reached Ela in Sopot to talk about her photography work as well as Sopot.
Ela Kinowska’s website
Polish Women Photographers
My second POLcast guest is a black musician/composer whom I heard playing Chopin’s music on his keyboard north of San Diego. One day, while having an online business meeting in a beautiful park on a very high ocean shore, I suddenly heard… Chopin’s music. I turned around and saw a black man in a colourful crocheted rastafarian hat. He was playing the piano keyboard. We started talking about his music and it turned out that Abdullah knows a lot about Chopin and Polish history, especially the Holocaust and the history of Jews in Poland. He showed me the book he had with him “The Jews of Warsaw 1939-1943. Ghetto, Underground, Revolt”.
POLcast always gives you some fun info connected to Poland. Here’s one such story – I bet that none of you know that (I hadn’t until I bumped into a post by John Krivit on FB Hey Audio Student page). You will learn about a Polish inventor Stefan Kudelski, whose work truly revolutionized Hollywood!
A propos Poles and Hollywood – I strongly recommend my two-part POLcast interview with US-based award winning film producer, screenwriter and director as well as author Andrzej Krakowski: “Pollywood – it’s Poles who created the media industry” – part 1 in Episode 25 and part 2 – in Episode 26. Another amazing Polish-related Hollywood story was “Polish Film Festival in Hollywood”, featured in the very first Episode of POLcast – my interview with Vladek Juszkiewicz who created the annual POlish Film Festival in LA.
And finally, the linguist in me always loves to give you something about the Polish language. You will hear an excerpt from my interview with the late Moses the polyglot and then some fun stuff about this crazy Polish language taken from this Facebook page.
PLEASE LISTEN TO POLCAST Jubilee Episode 100
– it’s a great overview of POLcast and quite a lot of fun as well.
