Exactingly shot and mesmeric in its glacial pace, BROTHERS is the kind of poetic film-making you will only find at a festival – and is well worth catching because of it.

BROTHERS, the fourth documentary from director Wojciech Staroń, trails the daily lives of Meiczyslaw and Alfons Kulakowski. Deported to Siberia in the 1940’s have spent a lifetime in exile. Now in their old age, they return to their Polish homeland and attempt to build a life. The film charts the pair’s shuffling movements and mumbling disagreements. Mieczyslaw was an engineer and sees only the practicalities of life; Alfons was a painter and communicates in metaphors and rhyme. Together they attempt to navigate the continuing difficulties of their existence and contemplate the larger significance of the long-delayed homecoming.

BROTHERS is a film for those who enjoy quiet, slow cinema. The feature begins with the Kulakowskis struggling up a hill. The camera waits patiently at the summit as the pair crawl into view. Inch by inch by inch, their heads emerge, their conversation murmuring through the soundtrack.  Inch by inch by inch, the film gradually decides it is going to begin. the tempo doesn’t accelerate from there. Long takes of fields and sparse interiors dissolve into one another as BROTHERS pauses for its subjects to absorb every detail of the life they have returned to. They, like us, must give their surroundings its full due. Occasionally the two whisper to one another. Once in a while they gesture.

Its a sparse meal for the viewer to consume. Tolerant attention, however, is reward as the gradual movements of Staroń’s documentary evolve into a poem exploring cinema’s oldest fascinations – age, memory and death. Footage from1940’s Poland intercuts the brothers story. The faded reels are accompanied by pulsing electronic music, evoking Bill Morrison’s haunting DECASIA. The memory that the brothers search for in the landscape survives in the filmed exerts. We see farmers tilling fields and building homes. The youth the Kulakowskis could have had momentarily bursts into moving life. The physical material than animates this past, however, is deteriorating. The film stock is decaying, verging on capitulation. We glimpse  history in these exerts. This history visible cracks and crevices, however, remind us of the temporality memory itself exists within.

The siblings similarly decay. Their skin is weathered and worn, their hair is grey and frail. They often pause while recounting their thoughts, uncertain of what they are recalling. Alfons ends the film in a hospital bed. He looks up at his opposite and whispers: “All was good until some point. If god wants… everything I (will) remember. All my life – everything as in the cinema.” The pair wish to view their past in their homecoming. The act of returning, however, only evidences the changes that have occurred and the moments that have slipped away. The scene is followed by a mirror of BROTHERS’ opening moments. Mieczyslaw walks up through a hill of yellow flowers. Near the top he stops. The image of the film becomes almost totally static – nothing moves. The shot holds as if jarred. Cinema’s motion momentarily collapses and with it its memory. The credits roll to show Alfons impressionist paintings, aspiring to motion in the motionless – a kind of cryptic parenthesis to images and indeed their creator.