The rundown factories of Lodz are a hotbed of movie making, says Gavin Thomas, who checks out the Polish city’s new creative edge. Photographs by Tim White

The first problem with Lodz is the name. To those unfamiliar with the finer nuances of the Polish language, the spelling is not so much unhelpful as provocatively misleading. Say “Lodz”, “Luds”, or anything remotely similar, and you’ll get nothing but the blankest of stares. The actual pronunciation is something like “Woodge” – the kind of woo-ing sound one might make while falling over after a few too many glasses of the city’s deceptively potent Lodzkie Mocne pilsner. Lodz, one quickly realises, is a slippery, surprising and frequently surreal sort of place – one in which nothing is quite what it seems, least of all its name.

Which perhaps explains how, on my first morning here, I found myself on the topmost floor of an abandoned factory on the outskirts of the city, perched high up amid a tangled bird’s nest of rattling metal catwalks and staircases. As I watched, a black-suited man in a bowler hat and a girl with an oversized red suitcase wandered enigmatically among piles of coal dust and scraps of rusted metal, surrounded by the festering remains of stalled machinery – a compellingly surreal vision of a Soviet-era, industrial, verismo-cum-Magritteinspired dream world. And before you accuse me of having had one too many glasses of Lodzkie Mocne pilsner myself, let me explain.

The factory is one of the locations for a new film, Zuzanna, being shot in the city by students Daria Kopiec and Monika Kotecka as part of their final-year diploma project. Daria and Monika are a pair of aspiring cineastes studying at Lodz’s world-famous film school, whose array of former students reads like a Who’s Who of Polish cinema, including Roman Polanski (The Pianist) and Krzysztof Kieslowski (Trois Couleurs). More recently, Lodz’s crumbling atmospheric industrial landscapes have attracted the attention of David Lynch, who shot large parts of his latest film, Inland Empire, in the city. No surprise then that the town is often referred to as Poland’s Hollywood – or, to be perfectly precise, “Hollywoodge”.

Hence the factory, the film, and the bowlerhatted spook. Lodz’s industrial landscapes have always loomed large in the imagination of the filmmakers who have worked here. As Kieslowski himself once put it, recalling his own student days in Lodz: “The whole world around was very sad. It was not even black and white, it was just black, or maybe grey. Lodz is photogenic because it is dirty and crappy. The whole city is like that. In a certain way, the whole world is like that. And people’s faces are like city walls: sad, full of a drama in their eyes.”

Of course things have changed a bit since then. The people of Lodz are not nearly so sad, and the city a lot less grey, but the factories remain – the legacy of Lodz’s days as Poland’s industrial powerhouse, until the collapse of communism in the 1990s finally silenced the city’s great cotton mills for good. Their decaying remains now ring the city centre like mementoes of a vanished era – derelict, red-brick colossi dotted with soaring chimneys, at once impressive, melancholy and strangely beautiful.

“I grew up here, and I’ve always been in love with these beautiful old buildings,” says Zuzanna’s producer, Agnieszka Wasiak. “We spent two months scouting around for locations for the film, and discovered the most amazing sights. People from other parts of Poland think that Lodz is just grey and depressing, but they don’t really understand the place at all.”

“It’s true,” adds director of photography and co-creator Monika Kotecka. “My own first impressions of Lodz weren’t good. It just looked gloomy and dirty. But later on I started looking for my own map of the city. Gradually I came to realise that Lodz is a very magical kind of place. There’s something wild about it, something dramatic. It’s a unique city, for sure, the people are very special, and the atmosphere is completely strange.”

Agnieszka agrees. “Only in Lodz could men fly around an old cotton mill in bowler hats!”

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