Following a broken marriage engagement, and driven by a quest for liberation, Director Julia Maryanska documents 13 years of her intimate life, challenging cultural norms and illuminating the complex landscapes of motherhood, sexuality, and female power.’
SYNOPSIS
Raised inside of a traditional Polish family, Julia rebels against societal norms and moves to San Francisco to embark on a journey of self-discovery in her youth, especially exploring her sexuality. Questioning cultural norms about and womanhood, and female sexuality, she turns the camera on herself and her closest relationships, in search of her own truth.
Her path leads her to counter-cultural communities, underground sex parties and anarchist festivals where she begins experimenting with polyamory, kink, and embracing her own queerness. However, when her fiancé forms a deep connection with another woman, she is heartbroken and makes a life-changing decision to leave the US and her travels take her around the world, and ultimately to Tamera, the Portuguese free-love peace village, where she researches how freeing love from fear is a political action.
Her inquiry and understanding of liberation evolves and matures as she later transitions into motherhood, navigating the colliding landscapes of career aspirations juxtaposed against the profound responsibilities of caring for a young child, and navigating partnership inside a polyamorous constellation.
As she returns to her home village in Poland, she carries questions of belonging. Her conservative cultural heritage, its prevailing homo-phobia, and alarming abortion ban highlight the ways her alternative life and family structure cannot exist within the frameworks of her home culture. She turns toward her parents who are approaching their 50th wedding anniversary, and specifically her mother, who is reclaiming her life’s passion of painting in her later life.
As mother and daughter, each woman is trying to understand the other through her art. Through the filming process, they slowly approach one another in a way that was never before possible. Intimate Revolutions is a delicate examination of female power, generational possibility and cultural belonging. It is is a captivating 13-year odyssey, a personal coming-of-age memoir that traces the diverse chapters of one woman's quest for an emancipated womanhood.
