School children in south central Poland, circa 1936

Julien Hequembourg Bryan (1899-1974) was an American documentarian and filmmaker. Bryan traveled widely taking 35mm film that he sold to motion picture companies. In the 1930s, he conducted extensive lecture tours, during which he showed film footage he shot in the former USSR. Between 1935 and 1938, he captured unique records of ordinary people and life in Nazi Germany and in Poland, including Jewish areas of Warsaw and Krakow and anti-Jewish signs in Germany. His footage appeared in March of Time theatrical newsreels. His photographs appeared in Life Magazine. He was in Warsaw in September 1939 when Germany invaded and remained throughout the German siege of the city, photographing and filming what would become America's first cinematic glimpse of the start of WWII. He recorded this experience in both the book Siege (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1940) and the short film Siege (RKO Radio Pictures, 1940) nominated for an Academy Award in 1940. In 1946, Bryan photographed the efforts of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency in postwar Europe. INT, CU of a man wearing a uniform with an elaborate hat, a fez with a large plume and a metallic embroidered emblem in the center of a hammer and anvil. He slowly removes the hat. Cut to a CU of a framed painting of a woman or man in medieval dress, holding a chalice in one hand and a sword in the other (biblical painting?). Zinc quarry with a CU of a worker drilling into the rock. EXT, MLS, two nuns lead a group of kindergarten age children from a schoolyard onto the street (a rural dirt road). The children file out and smile at the camera. INT, MS, inside the classroom, the young children area seated around a table, stringing beads as a nun walks around the table monitoring their activity. VS of the children engaged in their classroom activities. INT, MS, a one room apartment, a woman at the stove. VS, of the woman with her family, husband and two children in the kitchen area of the room. The young boy adjusts the knob on a radio, the father sits at the table waiting for his food, and the girl sits on the bed until the mother calls everyone to the table for soup. EXT, CU of a young girl talking to a young boy, it seems to be the same boy and girl that were just featured in the dinner table scene. The girl turns to look at the camera.