A street in the centre of Warsaw. As beloved postman Piotr explains, everything a person needs can be found here: a police station, funeral home, two produce shops and four Chinese restaurants… Director Arjun Talwar arrived here from India ten years ago, and he’s still trying to fit in. Wolf Street, however, is no walk in the park. In trying to better fit in and get over his feelings of alienation, the director turns the camera towards his neighbours.

He gets help from a fellow student, Mo, also a foreigner, and co-creator of this film, and together they reveal the street’s secrets and pleiad of charming characters: a neighbour from Damascus who is building a virtual model of his birth city, a travelling wind quartet, and many others. Like the director, they all live between the past and the present, between an imagined and real homeland. Paving paths across cultural differences, Talwar creates a witty and personal portrait of his new home country, revealing modern Europe’s contradictions and tensions within the kilometre-long Wolf Street.

In Polish, English, Chinese, Arabic and Romani with subtitles in Latvian and English.

A single street can be the right scale for a film, as Latvian audiences know from Ivars Seleckis’ film Crossroad Street, which received the European Film Award for Best Documentary in 1990. Letters from Wolf Street premiered in the Panorama programme at Berlinale this year.