We hear the projector whirr as the mute 16mm film flows through the sprockets and on to the screen. For three minutes and a little longer we watch children and adults spilling out of buildings, intrigued by the novelty of a camera on their streets.

First off, I must confess that fibre or textile art makes me queasy. I don’t know why, but all that threading, knotting, twisting, coiling and winding gives me the creeps. So it’s all the more extraordinary that I was blown away by Magdalena Abakanowicz’s huge woven sculptures.

Holidaying in Europe with his wife Lisa and friends in August 1938, David Kurtz of Flatbush, Brooklyn, whose family left Poland in 1892 when he was four, returned to his hometown of Nasielsk (population 7,000), 33 miles north-west of Warsaw. There, as an amateur cameraman, he unwittingly made a brief away-from-home movie that would prove to have unimaginable emotional power.

In Piotr Domalewski’s I Never Cry, newcomer Zofia Stafiej excels as sullen Polish schoolgirl Ora, who resentfully travels to Dublin to collect the body of her estranged father, Krzysztof, who has been killed on the unsafe waterfront site where he’d been hired as an emigrant construction worker. Since there’s no insurance money forthcoming to cover the cost of transporting the coffin, Ora fears she’ll have to use the money her dad said he was saving to buy her a car, supposing he was telling the truth.

Marcin Wicha’s mother Joanna never talked about her death. A Jewish counsellor based in an office built on top of the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto, her days were consumed by work and her passion for shopping. Only once did she refer to her passing, waving her hand around her apartment and asking Wicha: “What are you going to do with all this?”

As I write this, we've just had our final day in the rehearsal room and are going into tech onstage next week with my new play, which is also reopening the Donmar not only to live performance but follows major renovations at their home address.

It’s a little hard to tell if this film was really intended for an international release, given that its heart is so set on making Polish movie-goers proud of their countrymen. The Champion of Auschwitz recounts the true story of Tadeusz "Teddy" Pietrzykowski, a young bantamweight boxing champion from Warsaw who in 1940 was captured by the occupying Nazis as he tried to join the Polish army in France.

By chance, I started watching this streamed concert shortly after hearing a live BBC broadcast of the Philharmonia playing in front of an audience for the first time in over a year. Much though I love the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, steadfast companion over many Edinburgh winters, from student standby to bus pass, there is no doubt where I would have rather been.

Back in 2013, the London-based singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist launched the first of a trilogy of albums exploring her Polish roots and family history, entwined around the history of Poland and Europe and the traumas of the Second World War, as well as raising questions of personal and national identity.

Based on a novel by Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird is an extraordinarily powerful chronicle of a young Jewish boy’s survival in Eastern Europe, the scene of some of the most terrible violence, inhumanity, and depredation during the Second World War.  The Czech director Vacláv Marhoul worked on the project for more than 10 years. It's a labour of very dark love.