When: Friday, May 15 at 7pm
Where: Logan Center Screening Room on the campus of the University of Chicago
Admission: FREE
In 1961, in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, a group of recent migrants set out to do something audacious: make their own feature-length sound and color film. Highlanders Wedding is the result of this determination, and constitutes the earliest known moving-image documentation of performative practices within the Polish Highlanders community in the United States.
Conceived as a carefully staged reenactment of a traditional Highlander wedding, the film draws on embodied memory. What we encounter are not amateur actors merely performing assigned roles, but accomplished folk singers, musicians, and dancers, performing from experience rather than rehearsal. They draw on wedding rituals they had themselves lived through only a few years earlier in villages that were far away geographically but still close in memory. It is a rare ethnographic document and a striking example of how filmmaking becomes part of migrant community life.
Highlanders Wedding was screened only a handful of times in Chicago in the 1960s, exclusively within the Highlander community. Recently, the original reels were discovered in a private collection. In 2025, with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation, the film was digitized in 4K and a new 16mm print was struck. The May 15 screening will mark the premiere of the new 16mm print, presented with live English subtitles – the first, and possibly only, opportunity to see this film in English! (Ludwina Ról-Łuszczkowa, Antonina Błazończyk & George DeBelina, USA, 1961, 88 minutes, 16mm)
Presented in partnership with the University of Chicago Film Studies Center, Chicago Film Archives, the Polish Highlanders Alliance of North America, and Agata Zborowska’s Not-So-Ordinary project, with support from the Department of Slavic Languages & Literature and the Department of History.
The screening of Highlanders Wedding will be followed by a reception. This event is free and open to the public. Doors will open thirty minutes prior to showtime.
