‘Letters From Wolf Street’ Review: A Documentary That Takes an Immigrant Lens to a Changing Polish Neighborhood

In the Warsaw-set “Letters From Wolf Street,” an immigrant filmmaker takes to the streets — which is to say, he captures the unassuming sidewalks beneath his window. What begins as a series of wry observations about the director’s immediate surroundings gradually unfurls as a vibrant reflection (and self-reflection) on the fabric of modern Poland, as told through the eyes of Indian director Arjun Talwar, whose decade-long stint in the country has brought him no closer to feeling grounded.

Talwar narrates the entire movie in Indian-accented Polish, which reads like an attempt to assimilate through filmmaking while also emphasizing his outsider status. Drawn to Poland’s cinema from New Delhi, he lays out the details of his move alongside his late friend Adi, a radical artist who sought to stand out and rebel, while Talwar tried to blend in. This spiritual tug-of-war verging on impostor syndrome underlies the entirety of “Letters From Wolf Street,” even in its most acerbic exchanges with fellow transplants, long-time neighborhood fixtures (a store clerk, a postman) and everyday passersby.

Wolf Street is an aging, sleepy enclave filled with history, including bullet holes from World War II, but Talwar captures it with bustling zeal. These dueling sensations are emphasized by Aleksander Makowski’s score, which veers between waltzing whimsy and haunting woodwinds, a keen cross-cultural blend. Baked into the movie’s very fabric are questions of belonging — of cultural origin — which Talwar investigates with his digital camera, imitating the nostalgic authenticity of 16mm celluloid in the process. Although he turns his lens occasionally on himself, his casual scrutiny of contemporary Polish life and changing demographics paints a broader picture of the world he inhabits, often in tongue-in-cheek ways.

His approach to interviews is disarming. At times, this leads to shockingly funny moments of frank (if occasionally well-meaning) racism from older locals, who feel comfortable enough in his presence to let loose. He is at once welcomed and rejected. With a film school confidant at his side (Chinese immigrant filmmaker Mo Tan), Talwar ends up holding a mirror to vital contemporary debates on rising right-wing sentiment in Europe, as well as the intimate corners of his own experience.

The question of what it means to be Polish remains on the movie’s tongue for much of its runtime, and the answers Talwar turns up are fascinating. Some are about mood, others about lineage; a few are even about work ethic from Poles who claim to love immigrants, but they do so conditionally. Feeling excluded from such findings, the filmmaker even goes searching through the annals of Polish history for significant non-white figures who contributed to the country and its culture — an African general, a Tahitian actress — as though acceptance could be a retroactive process.

This thread is deftly contrasted with ongoing conversations about nationalistic nostalgia, and how the past can become a poison, as though he were susceptible to the very same temptations. However, this impulse to search the past for answers takes surprising form as well, when Talwar looks to an older film (by a Polish director, Andrzej Jakimowski) that takes a strikingly similar subject, further connecting him to the legacy of the spaces depicted.

There’s a raw honesty to Talwar’s odyssey through the history of his city block and its inhabitants’ curious opinions that makes it gently confrontational, without ever placing its author and its lens on a superior pedestal. Even when he’s engulfed by neo-Nazi demonstrations, Talwar wants nothing more than to belong — a nerve-racking ethical tug-of-war that introduces a sense of danger. The result is a film whose musings on being torn between cultures feel entirely novel, blending the worlds of personal artistic journey and wider ethnographic study. It’s much smarter than people are likely to give it credit for, which, if nothing else, is a blisteringly accurate depiction of immigrant life in the Western Hemisphere.