Henryka Dobosz-Kinaszewska, born in 1940, is a Polish journalist and film-maker. In 1962 she started working in a publishing house, but soon chose journalism as her career path. Through the 1960s and 1970s she worked in several Polish newspapers, focusing on cultural issues in her writing.
In August 1980 she joined the protests of the Gdansk Shipyard workers and, along with almost 50 other writers, she signed the statement of Polish journalists endorsing the strike (the working version of this documents is now an exhibit at the European Solidarity Centre). During the martial law she engaged in creating and disseminating underground press and grey literature, which she also edited. After 1989 she continued her journalist career. Moreover, in the 1990s she became involved in the film-making environment. Acting as a director and screenwriter she created several documentaries, mostly focused on political and social activists (e.g. Stanisław Barańczuk and Lech Bądkowski).
In 1983 her family was dragged into the intrigue of Secret Services directed to discredit Karol Wojtyla (the Pope John Paul II). Wojtyla was a long-time friend of Henryka's husband's ,Adam Kinaszewski's, family. Because Adam was raised without a father, the regime's media started the rumour, which claimed that Wojtyla is in fact his father. The information was easily denied and proved to be just a weak attempt of Secret Services to undermine the Pope's authority among Poles.
In the Notation Henryka Dobosz-Kinaszewska shares her personal experiences. Her narration shows a lot of humour, which seemed to help her in the hardest times of the martial law. She also describes her own "dissident awakening": she states that in consequence of her own experiences from 1981 (e.g. arrest of her husband Adam Kinaszewski and her daughter's fear) she started to recognise patriotic feelings and to understand the sense of oppositional activity.
Film Notation with Henryka Dobosz-Kinaszewska is a part of the first edition of a project "Solidarity. What is left" conducted by the European Solidarity Centre in Gdansk (with technical support of Video Studio Gdansk and financial donation from the National Centre for Culture, through the "Patriotism of Tomorrow" programme). Since 2008 there has been VII editions of the "Solidarity. What is left" initiative.
