It's Dorothy!

Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly / Birds fly over the rainbow / Why, then, oh, why can’t I? sang Dorothy, played by Judy Garland, in The Wizard of Oz. But the iconic 1939 role wasn’t the first or last incarnation of the girl whisked away from tornado-stricken Kansas to the other side of the rainbow. L. Frank Baum’s novel, published 125 years ago, inspired generations of artists, each reimagining the tale through their own lens, from Sidney Lumet’s The Wiz, starring Diana Ross, who bestowed wings on Black girls, to the critically panned Return to Oz from the 1980s, with 11-year-old Fairuza Balk, and the televised The Wiz Live! (2015). Dorothy also holds special meaning in LGBTQ+ history, becoming a lasting icon for generations of gay men once known as “friends of Dorothy.” In his latest film, It’s Dorothy!, Jeffrey McHale (You Don’t Nomi) dives into extensive archival materials and interweaves them with conversations featuring icons of American music including Shanice Williams, Rufus Wainwright, and Ashanti. With a lightness of touch and a sharp anthropological eye, There’s Dorothy! explores a singular figure whose journey still resonates across pop culture and identity.

before the screening introduction by Karolina Kostyra

Karolina Kostyra – cinephile, film studies scholar, and assistant professor at the Institute of Cultural Studies, University of Silesia in Katowice. She is the author of publications on teen films and coming-of-age narratives in cinema, including the books Splendor in the Grass: Nature Images in Coming-of-Age Films (Katowice, 2019) and The Secret Life of Objects: The Topography of the Children’s Room in 1980s Fantastic Cinema (Katowice, 2025). 

The aim of this book is to determine the topography of a children’s room – a space regularly depicted in the fantastic cinema of the 1980s. The bedrooms of protagonists in the American horror, fantasy and science fiction in the era of Reaganism serve as spheres of paranormal and miraculous phenomena. The author demonstrates that the interior spaces in which children confront otherness, experience transgression, dream nightmares and imagine daydreams should be understood as the manifestations of children’s gaze in the popular cinema.

in Polish only