
On Tram Tracks Through Wrocław: A City in Transition
Tram line No. 1 has rolled through Wrocław for 140 years, past wartime rubble and, today, past renovated facades, new apartment blocks and the grassy banks of the River Oder. This film rides along with driver Tatjana Granowska, a former travel agency worker from Kazakhstan who left tourism to steer trams through the city she now calls unbeatable. Along the route it stops to talk with residents the tram passes daily: Kamil Zaremba, who lost everything in the 1997 floods and now lives on a houseboat, where he also runs a floating cultural center called Odra Centrum; and Zenon Dębowski, a locksmith who found steady community through an art initiative called The Colorful Courtyards in the Nadodrze district. Students, artists and longtime locals fill out the picture of Poland's third-largest city as rents rise and neighborhoods change. The tram itself becomes a narrative device, its window framing decades of reconstruction and reinvention along the Oder.