In 1996, Wojciech Staron documented Malgosia, his girlfriend, as she traveled the Siberian city Usolie-Sibirskoe and gave Polish language lessons to the descendants of exiled Poles. Captured on beautiful 16mm film, Siberian Lesson is the candid diary of a young teacher acclimating and falling in love, as well as a portrait of a community still reeling from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many years after their Siberian journey, now a married couple with two children, Wojciech and Malgosia traveled to a very different place: Azara, a remote village in northern Argentina, where Malgosia once again taught Polish to fellow emigrants. In the gorgeous, startlingly intimate Argentinian Lesson, Wojciech also turns his 16mm camera on Janek, his 8-year-old son, and his friend Marcia, a bright Argentinian girl of Polish descent bravely contending with poverty. As independent episodes, Siberian Lesson (1998) and Argentinian Lesson (2011) have screened at film festivals.
