Letters From Wolf Street: Immigrant blues in Warsaw

To turn the camera on yourself to tell the story is an act of defiance-the storyteller is the story, both birther and birthed.

- Prathyush Parasuraman

It is also indulgent, and its indulgence, if charming, is often forgiven. Charm twists the demands we make of people, of cinema, and filmmaker Arjun Talwar knows this.

The fragile quality of Letters From Wolf Street, which played at the recently concluded Berlin Film Festival, comes from this charm that tunnels us through his memoir of an Indian immigrant who tries and fails, but whose failure does not stop him from keeping on trying to findahome in Poland. Wolf Street is where Talwar lives, in central Warsaw, with Vietnamese restaurants, an anarchist shoe repairman, a postal officer who's also an archivist, police stations and funeral homes.