DEKALOG

An 11-day intensive on Krysztof Kieślowski's DEKALOG, culminating with a New Year's integration to lay the foundation for 2026.

This course can be taken on its own-- or at a discount for participants in THE REDDENING

THE DEKALOG is a 10-part made-for-TV series of films directed by by Krystof Kieslowski, co-written by Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz, focusing the lives of people in a single brutalist housing complex around Christmastime in Warsaw--

based on (but never merely illustrative of) The Ten Commandments, premiering on Polish TV in 1988, perhaps the filmmaker's most ambitious and courageous work of art.

Why THE DEKALOG and why now?   

Because it deals questions of moral and spiritual truth without ever once flattening its characters or their struggles into black-and-white categorizations.

Because it is unflinchingly emotional -- in the delineation of its characters, in the way it works with music, color, timing, and subltety.

Because it confronts the impulse to bypass-- or transcend-- human impulse digitally in ways that resonate uncannily to the present moment.

And it also wrestles with the differences and relations between individual rage and state violence.

Because it was made for everyone in a society at a particular inflection point, facing collapse. 

Roger Ebert on The Dekalog: "it shows that the Ten Commandments are less like science and more like art..."

These films are what Kafka said, in 1904, that a book should be:

an "axe for the frozen sea inside us."

December 15-24 • December 30

ten sessions: introduction

+ a culminating integration session ahead of the new year

infinite replay + private whatsapp