According to a Jewish tradition, the baptism of a commune member is a mortal sin. Nevertheless, in the 18th century, Jakub Lejbowicz, who goes by the name Franek, managed to convince six thousand Jews from the Eastern borderlands of the First Republic of Poland to commit this disgraceful act.
Olga Tokarczuk fills in the blank pages of the Polish history by describing the history of the self-appointed Messiah in The Books of Jacob. She lets the Podole Jews speak, both the ones who fought against Franek and those who believed in him, and she objects to a popular, Sienkiewicz-like vision of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a Poland that would be dominated exclusively by the gentry and Catholicism. From this viewpoint, the political and religious domination of Poles is viewed as oppressive and unjust, but the equality-based cult of Jakub Franek constitutes one of the few areas of freedom in the modern society.
In the adaptation of a monumental novel by Tokarczuk, Ewelina Marciniak focuses on universal values that could have determined accession to Franek’s heretical sect: the need for personal freedom, the equality before the law, a feeling of community, and most of all – the need for faith and religious experience. Marciniak investigates the way in which contact with the divine is not only experienced by soul, but also flesh. She observes how this contact appears in daily situations and rituals, which were the center of a religious cult. She is trying to find out about the closeness between erotic and mystic experiences.
For adults only.