Our life

True story, real faces brought back to life from old photos with the help of artificial intelligence. The video and music were composed by Ryszard Kowalczyk.

Author's note:
The little 5-year-old girl at the beginning of the clip is my grandmother Olga. Her father was a Ukrainian kulak named Fiodor Shkarlat. In 1930, Soviet soldiers came to their home and took the family away. They put her father and mother (Pelagia Shkarlat) in a wooden, barred kibitka, took her 6-year-old brother, Viktor, away, and Olga never saw them again (she found her mother only after Stalin's death in 1956 through the Red Cross, they met, but her mother died shortly after, in 1956). Olga was sent to an orphanage in Smolensk, where she spent 11 years until 1941.

This was the true story, according to what I remember from my grandfather Andrzej's stories, after consulting with my mother, who is pictured at the end of the video in a baby carriage a few months after her birth.

This clip should also serve as a tribute to people like Georg Keidel and his family, who, despite the risk to their own lives, helped others in need.

About the film:
I used publicly available artificial intelligence algorithms to create the film. My primary goal is to convey a message. I took the faces of my grandmother and grandfather from old photographs (the oldest from 1946) and tried to make them look as authentic as possible.

About the music:
I composed the song "Our Life" in 1992 and performed it at concerts with the band Chimera in the 1990s. Now, thanks to artificial intelligence and many years of experience in sound engineering, I've managed to recreate this piece and create a new sound.
SUNO: https://suno.com/s/ijq6pmpXHvpEzeuN