Julia Pirotte - beauty and strength

The documentary “Julia Pirotte — Beauty and Strength” tells the hitherto unknown story of Julia Pirotte — Polish war photojournalist of Jewish origin, born in Końskowola, who worked in the resistance movement in France during World War II.

With a camera as a weapon, she documents the French resistance movement, the liberation of Marseille (her photos are anonymously found in the 1946 film directed by René Clément “The Battle of the Rails”); the Kielce Pogrom in 1946 and the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace in Wrocław in 1948 (the famous portraits of Picasso, Tuwim, Pudowkin are by her).

Her younger sister Maria, also a courier of the resistance movement between Paris and Marseille, is arrested by the Gestapo while transferring reports to the Central Command and guillotined in Wrocław; on her way to her death, she cries to her fellow prisoners: “Courage!”
After decades of silence, Julia sent her war photographs to France in 1980 and won the 1st Prize at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d'Arles. There she meets Jeanne Vervoort-Vercheval, a Belgian feminist and social activist, and Georges Vercheval, founder of the Museum of Photography in Charleroi, to whom she passes on her negatives. The rest of the archive is given to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. A feminist who already at the beginning of the 80s foresaw the reduction of women's rights that continues to this day.

Filmed in France, Belgium and Poland, its integral part is unique, previously unpublished archival materials that create an intimate and moving portrait of Julia's world and the turbulent history seen through her lens.

“Julia Pirotte — Beauty and Strength” is a film that reveals the legacy of a woman erased from official history and at the same time faithful to the ideas of justice, freedom and dignity. Her life is a moving testimony to the resistance, memory and power of photography.