RÓŻA MISZTELA
- Lucie Blaze
- Apr 10
- 5 min read
filmmaker, poet, photographer, researcher
For Róża Misztela, creating is about fully inhabiting a space. Thought and feeling are inseparable; her stories grow from her internal experiences as much as from the plot itself. Whether through poetry, photography, or film, her work begins with a state of complete presence.
While her film school training provided technical mastery, her current practice involves unlearning rigid rules. She views her projects as evolving biographies (including her own) where emotional and conceptual truth is more important than literal facts. Across all her work, she focuses on turning lived experience into art, always prioritizing intuition over a preplanned structure.
“Everything I create passes through the filter of my body and my experiences, so in a sense, it is all autobiographical. It is about a flicker of emotion that demands exploration.”
The architecture of concision
For Róża, the short form is a medium of intensity. She finds a profound parallel between poetry and the short film, valuing both for their requirement of compression and precision. Typically ranging between nine and thirteen minutes, her films demand an economy of narrative where every frame must carry weight. This brevity is liberating; it permits a depth of resonance and a clarity of expression that might otherwise be lost in longer formats. Like a handwritten poem developed over weeks, her films condense atmosphere and gesture into a precise arc, preserving the classic structure of beginning, middle, and end in miniature. This dedication to the “short” is evident in her collaborative work with Anita Kwiatkowska-Nagvi, such as Momo & Lulu, a claymation piece telling the story of two sea creatures meeting for a dance in the deep, hostile ocean. Here, the tactile nature of the animation meets a choreographed rhythm, demonstrating how brevity can amplify the impact of an encounter. This piece was developed within the Lele Crossmedia Production film studio.
Materiality and the cinematic body
While poetry requires only pen and paper, filmmaking is a social and organizational practice. It demands a team, equipment, and resources, yet Róża maintains thatthe essential principle remains one of relationality. Through her co-founded collective, LeLe Crossmedia Production, she engages in a methodology of creative independence for all involved subjects. This structure allows for a multiplicity of vision and rigorous collaboration while sustaining her own creative autonomy.
In contrast to the high-stakes coordination of film, her photography remains a tactile, often analog pursuit. It is a physical act of assembling and editing film, tape, or Polaroids, an intimate engagement with the textures of reality. Across all these media, time and repetition structure her practice. She understands that information arrives gradually, often after the experience rather than before it. By foregrounding the physical and the iterative, she places her work in quiet opposition to the acceleration of contemporary production, favoring a tempo where language and image accumulate meaning slowly.
Bez nazwy Photo: Róża Misztela
Black Habit Photo: Róża Misztela
Ethical proximity and the documentary lens
Audience and perception are the foundation of Róża’s cinematic ethics. She views her work as a shared emotional space where story and sensation meet with total honesty. This sensitivity is most evident in her documentary work, where she engages with difficult historical and sociopolitical legacies. Rather than focusing on violence, she investigates the subtle origins of harm, tracking how “evil” often begins in everyday spaces, like the shared jokes or casual prejudices of a community.
In projects like Granica (The Border), she navigates ethical complexity with a rare blend of audacity and care. Her investigative method involves entering high-risk environments to record firsthand perspectives, such as her deep-cover research into neo-Nazi gatherings. By using herself as a lens, she documents these spaces from the inside to interrogate how extremist ideologies are maintained.
Through this commitment to deep listening and presence, Róża balances the physical danger of her research with a profound responsibility toward her subjects. She aims to create “shared space” for the viewer, one that facilitates a sense of catharsis and invites a deeper understanding of the relationships between humans and the spaces they inhabit.
The filter of lived experience
Róża’s practice often centers on internal journeys, focusing on characters who must reconcile with the past to reclaim the future. Many of the works she has edited or produced, such as Locus (2016) and Kinky, center on women navigating deep, internal memories. This aligns with her own artistic focus on works that pass through the filter of the body and lived experience.
The Journey (2018) serves as a compelling example of this intersection between speculative autobiography and collective narrative. Following an eccentric aristocrat and a teenage YouTuber through the kingdom of Bhutan, the film exemplifies a creative process born from an attentive inhabitation of space rather than a rigid, premeditated script.
In these productions, she demonstrates an ability to condense complex emotional arcs and atmospheric truths into specific cinematic experiences. For Róża, the final form is a negotiation between personal vision and viewer understanding, ensuring that while the work is conceptually rigorous, it remains a shared space where story and sensation can finally meet.
Somatic replenishment
Róża’s work is built on a careful balance of focus and inspiration. She protects her creative space so she can stay physically and emotionally connected to her materials. This dedicated attention allows her to draw from her main sources of inspiration: nature, poetry, and film. Spending time in forests and oceans recharges her senses, while the structure of poetry helps shape the rhythm of her films.
These influences blend together, giving her images deep emotion and her writing a cinematic feel. While deadlines help her stay productive and avoid overthinking, she is selective about feedback. She only shares her work with a few trusted people who respect her process. By guarding her creative state, she ensures her films and poems stay “alive” and continue to grow
through reflection and conversation.
What remains
Ultimately, Róża’s work is an interrogation of the boundaries between history and identity. For her, art is the space where the personal meets the social, the affective meets the structural, and emotion meets intellect. Through brevity, relationality, and imaginative rigor, she crafts works that persist long after the initial encounter ends.
In a world of constant noise, her practice insists on the power of the “filter”, the belief that by passing a story through one’s own body and experience, it gains a truth that fact alone cannot provide. Beyond the film or poem itself, there remains a lasting resonance in the viewer’s perception; a seed planted in fertile ground that evolves long after the screening ends.
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