Agnieszka Smoczyńska's Fuga | Fugue (2018)

A youngish woman (Gabriela Muskala) pushes her way up to a subway station platfrom in Warsaw after crossing the rails on foot and the proceeds to openly piss on the floor of the platform. The authorities take in this obviously mentally disturbed woman whose name is Alicya, although she has no memory of her past. It's only in a highly improbable TV progamme in which missing people appear in person that her father recognises her as his daughter Kinga who disappeared two years before.

The reunion is strained as she has no recollection of her previous identity. She is cold towards husband Krzysztof (Lukasz Simlat) and her young son Daniel (Iwo Rajski). Her main interest seems to be in getting her identity card and leaving. Krzysztof is amazed that she can remember where the fuse box is but doesn't recognise her family, although the fuse reflex is of course just a motor mechanism. She learns that Ewa (Malgorzata Buczkowska), quite possibly the new woman in her husband's life, is (as Kinga used to be) a geography teacher. Slowly she begins to thaw: unexpectedly, she sucks Krzysztof to climax, has sex with him, and they begin behaving like a conventional family, although she has strange inexplicable bouts of madness and pukes a black substance, obviously still in distress.

Two years before she had a road accident, thought she had killed her son and then just disappeared. For two years she had a new identity, many things have changed with her trauma, and she can't return to her old normality and pretend to herself and others that nothing has happened: she has to leave. A gripping, stunning second feature by Agnieszka Smoczyńska.

Marek Koterski's Dzień świra | Day of the Wacko (2002)

Adaś Miauczyński (Marek Kondrat) is a divorced Polish teacher with obsessive compulsive disorder, but really he's a professional complainer. He can't stand tiny noises that grate on him, he's disturbed by the presence and the activities of people on trains; if he goes to sunbathe on a beach other people appear and talk to each other mindlessly, even a seagull annoys him and he wants to kill it; when he spills cornflakes on the kitchen floor he has to pick them up and eat them as people in underdeveloped countries are starving.

His life is ritual: counting the seconds it takes to piss; counting the number of gulps of water; adjusting his crotch as he sits down on the sofa and spreads his legs out, slightly crossing them; he could be a candidate for the funny farm.

Yet it certainly wasn't the forgetting to kiss the crucifix that got me, it was the constant returns to check that he'd locked his door that made me think of Philip Larkin's 'something sufficiently toad-like / Squats in me, too': yep, something Adaś-like is in me. Or is that in every‌one? Isn't Adaś no more than a huge exaggeration of us all? Fascinating, and infuriating, film that bites you on the ass.

Michal Marczak's Wszystkie nieprzespane noce | All These Sleepless Nights (2016)

This is a good title for this half-documentary, half-fiction of two friends. I wouldn't call it a good film though. OK, we have Warsaw, or Poland in general, seeking for an identity like its children, but essentially this is lost children in their twenties drifting through the city from endless party to endless party, smoking incessantly, drinking incessantly, fucking, smoking cannabis, hoovering up coke, wandering around the deserted city in the early hours of the morning on MDMA. Yes, they enjoy being young, in some way seem to be trying to find themselves but don't quite fit into whatever reality they're looking for. This is perhaps a brave experimental film, but in the end I couldn't see what the point was, but maybe that was just the point. Let's dress as a pink rabbit with a microphone and make comments to people passing by in a park who might give you a sweet or too, or maybe we're just walking along a busy road miraculously dodging being killed. Instead of building anything, or even talking sense, these people just seem to be playing at self-destruction with no other goal, no intellectual curiosity, just playing at living in the fast lane.

Małgorzata Szumowska's 33 sceny z życia | 33 Scenes from Life (2008)

 

This film is set in Cologne where photographer Julia (Julia Jentsch) is in turmoil: when her mother Barbara (Małgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik) becomes seriously ill with cancer her world begins to collapse. Not the best of Polish films.

Hanna Polak and Andrzej Celinski's Dzieci z Leningradzkiego | The Children of Leningradsky (2004)

It took two years to make this thirty-three minute film on a shoestring budget. It is gruelling to watch the children who live in and around Moscow's railway stations, sleeping there or on the street, or in derelict houses. They survive by begging at the stations, people leave money for them, feel sorry for them. They may have no parents, their parents may have thrown them out, may be alcoholics or drug addicts, may have been beaten and forced to leave home, but their friends are here now. Many become addicted to glue and vodka to survive, anything to avoid the reality of their lives. And they live in constant fear of death, young children, male or female, prostituting themselves to paedophiles. They are bullied and robbed by the older ones, and in turn they bully the old tramps. The police beat them, they have sores on their faces, they fight each other, if they are sent to an orphanage they get beaten, there is no hope for any future. An unforgettable movie about the hell of a post-Soviet Russia whose authorities have no concern for its children.

Mariusz Wilczyński's Zabij to i wyjedź z tego miasta | Kill It and Leave This Town (2020)

Famously, Faulkner uses these two sentences in his novel Requiem for a Nun: 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' Similarly, ‌in this animated film these words appear (as subtitles): 'Everyone who has gone, has gone. They haven’t died, they’re still alive in my imagination, including my parents, to this day.' Wilczyński's autobiographical film very much concerns his dead parents, his memories of them at different stages both in his and their lives. It's also hallucinatory, violent, surreal and disturbing. Animals frequently appear, there's an obsession with flies, his parents' heads turn into birds' heads, perspective is changed, a boat on the sea becomes a toy boat in a bath, the film maker takes on a huge size compared with other objects or people, etc. This film, set in the industrial landscape of Łódź, took Wilczyński fourteen years to make, and seems to be an act of love. At one point a representation of his mother, close to death, asks him what the film's about, and he finds it difficult to answer.

Pawel Łoziński's Nawet nie wiesz, jak bardzo cie kocham | You Have No Idea How Much I Love You (2016)

 

This is an amazing film by Pawel Łoziński, being a series of therapy sessions between a Polish mother and her daughter, in her twenties, guided by the psychiatrist Bogdan de Barbaro. The mother Ewa has been divorced from her husband since before her daughter Hania was in her teens, and the sessions work towards a very tentative reconciliation between the two. The camera restricts itself to very long close-up shots of the faces of the three people. Inner thoughts are revealed, and this is very compelling viewing with not a single boring moment.