No European capital was more thoroughly destroyed than Warsaw. After the uprising of 1944, German forces demolished what remained of the city in a systematic operation, and the old town was left as a field of rubble. What followed is the reason the city is filmed today: an act of collective reconstruction, carried out from surveys, engravings and the views painted by Bernardo Bellotto in the eighteenth century, which restored the market square, the burghers' houses, the ramparts and the Royal Castle to their earlier form. That historic centre was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List precisely as an exceptional example of reconstruction. Beyond it, the film reads the other Warsaws layered across the same ground: the classical avenues of the royal route, the memorials and traces of the ghetto, the socialist monumentality of the Palace of Culture, and the glass towers of a contemporary business capital. A portrait of a city that chose to rebuild rather than start over.
