Wednesday, October 21, 2026 | 6:30 pm
Location: Residency Unlimited, 360 Court Street (main green church doors), Brooklyn, NY 11231 (map)
Please join us for the screening of The Arrow (“Strzała” in Polish), a 53-minute by the multimedia RU artist and filmmaker Xawery Deskur that was initially presented in 2023 at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków as part of the Chris Schwarz Memorial Art Award and exhibition “The Place of Singing stones” as an exploration on how Native American culture, lore, and Indigenous identity were translated, perceived, and sometimes mythologized within Central Europe.
In “The Arrow”, Deskur explores the enigmatic figure of Sat-Okh (Stanisław Supłatowicz) and the mechanisms of cultural appropriation and the postwar, post-utopian longings that connected Poles to their imagination of Native American cultures. Known as a writer and activist in the 1980’s who claimed Polish-Native American heritage, Sat-Okh was widely considered as the central spiritual and cultural figurehead of the Polish Indianist movement (Polski Ruch Przyjaciół Indian).
Deskur has been engaged with this subject since 2018, when he began working on the screenplay for a feature film about Sat-Okh. Aware that the story touches on the controversial issue of cultural appropriation embodied by the Polish Indianist movement—and mindful of how this reads in light of contemporary cultural discourse—Deskur felt compelled to look more closely at the perspective of U.S. colonialism and to understand the problem of cultural appropriation more deeply, so that the image of the Native American would not be reduced to a simple, conventional symbol.
Trailer for the movie “The Arrow”:
The film will be followed by a discussion between the artist and Ru Marshall, RU alum, artist and author of American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda. The starting point for this conversation will be the surprising parallels between the story of Sat-Okh and the Castaneda phenomenon: two twentieth-century “literary tricksters” who built their identities and authority on a (partially fictional) experience of indigeneity, while simultaneously becoming both criticized and fascinating figures on the cultural frontier. Each used the figure of the Indigenous sage to speak to a crisis of identity within their own culture — one working through the lens of exoticized Latin American anthropology, the other through the lens of Cold War Eastern European fantasy.
About
Xawery Deskur (born 1988 in Aix-en-Provence) – visual artist and filmmaker. Graduate of the Department of Graphic Arts at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (2015); Ph.D. in Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (2026). He completed the Script screenwriting course and the Dok Pro documentary film course at the Wajda School. He received a grant from the Polish Film Institute (2018), the “Young Poland” program of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage (2021), and the City of Kraków (2022), as well as the Re:Side program of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute (2026). He is the recipient of the Hestia Artistic Journey (2014) and the Chris Schwarz Award, which included a solo exhibition at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków (2022).
His science fiction documentary “Are You There?” (2023) premiered in the Polish Competition at the Kraków Film Festival and won awards for Best Documentary Film in the Polish-Czech competition at the Zoom Zbliżenia Festival in Jelenia Góra, the Golden Award at the Heart of Europe International TV Festival & Forum in Warsaw, and Best First-Time Filmmaker at the LA Art Film Fest in Los Angeles (2025). He has presented his earlier film and video works at, among others, Sundance TV Shorts, Video Art & Experimental Shorts in New York (honorable mention), the Berlin Short Film Festival (Best Experimental Film award), the WRO Biennale in Wroclaw (PL), and the Etiuda & Anima Festival in Krakow (PL).
Ru Marshall, a nonbinary visual artist and writer and 2023 Alum curator, is the recipient of the Hazel Rowley Prize from the Biographers International Organization for American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda (OR Books), which Kirkus calls “a project of epic proportions, pulled off remarkable élan.” Their novel, A Separate Reality, was nominated for a Lambda Award for debut fiction, and their writing has appeared in N+1, Salon, The Evergreen Review, Artnet, The Kenyon Review, and numerous other publications. Their visual work has been exhibited at Participant Inc., White Columns, Art in General, Ghost Machine, Cathouse Proper, and at numerous venues worldwide. Their website is rmarshallstudio.com
This program is supported by the Polish Cultural Institute New York and co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
