LOGLINE
In defiance of her traditional Polish roots, seeking liberation in SF’s countercultures, Julia films her most intimate life chapters for 15 years. With camera as both confessional and compass, she unravels and reweaves womanhood beyond societal scripts- until a return to her Polish village forces a raw reckoning with identity, her own mother and her motherland.
SYNOPSIS
Intimate Revolutions is a poetic, vérité-style coming-of-age memoir tracing one woman’s 15-year journey from a conservative Polish upbringing to the radical edge of San Francisco’s countercultures—and ultimately, to unexpected reconciliation through motherhood and return to her ancestral homeland.
At 24, disillusioned with inherited ideals, Julia leaves behind her Polish roots and a rising film career in New York to chase eros and liberation in the Bay Area. She falls into a relationship with a magnetic man known as “B,” moves into a sex commune, and begins filming their life. What starts as a record of polyamory, psychedelics, and queer awakening deepens into a raw chronicle of transformation—especially as motherhood enters the frame.
The camera becomes both confessional and compass, capturing one woman’s unraveling and reweaving of womanhood beyond societal scripts. Her eventual return to her Polish village with her daughter forces a reckoning—with identity, expectation, and the ghosts of tradition. Yet through vulnerability, art, and her evolving bond with her mother, she uncovers surprising echoes of sensuality, truth, and homecoming.
Intimate Revolutions is a lyrical meditation on freedom, belonging, and the sacred tensions between rebellion and return, body and lineage, self and society.
DIRECTOR’S STATMENT
For over fifteen years, I’ve been making social change documentaries—and with this film, I turn the camera inward. Intimate Revolutions is a personal excavation and political act, a poetic memoir of my own journey through womanhood, sexuality, and motherhood. By placing myself on both sides of the lens, I speak not only for myself but for a generation of women breaking free from inherited scripts and cultural taboos.
This film is a confrontation—with my mother and my motherland. Raised in conservative Poland and reborn in the radical landscapes of the San Francisco Bay Area, I’ve wrestled with the stories I was given about my body, desire, and duty. Motherhood cracked me open even further, forcing me to face the unresolved wounds of my lineage and to question what liberation truly looks like—not just for me, but for my daughter.
Intimate Revolutions seeks to bring visibility to what is often hidden: the erotic power and pain that flow through the female experience across the stages of maiden, mother, and crone. It challenges the fetishization of youth, the silencing of older women, and the stigmas surrounding female pleasure and non-traditional relationships. I want to offer a language of trust, rawness, and beauty that encourages intergenerational healing and invites viewers to question the norms that keep us small.
At its core, this film is an invitation—to soften our binaries, to embrace our complexities, and to live a little truer to the fierce and luminous truths that stir within us.
Julia Maryanska, Filmmaker
