A retired police captain, Siwy, tells a reporter about his latest action, carrying on his own investigation into the mysterious death of a Ewa Salm, a.k.a. Princess. She was a witness in a case where the defendant pled guilty and was sentenced to eight years in prison. Siwy doubts the defendant's...
A banker troubled by both business and personal problems is transferred to a small town. There he meets and seduces an older woman. Together, they decide to pull off a payroll holdup together.
A businessman, spoiled by the good life, learns that he suffers from a serious heart condition. He can only survive by finding a donor immediately. In the hospital, he accidentally meets a young man whose grief and job loss have taken away all his will to live. He is suicidal, so he is the perfect...
A simple governess and a wealthy aristocrat fall madly in love with each other. However, his family are prejudiced towards her and have other plans for him.
Westerplatte is a small peninsula at the entry to the Gdańsk Harbour. Before World War II, it functioned as a Polish ammunition depot in the Free City of Danzig. Its crew consisted of one infantry company and a group of civilians, 182 people in total. It was the only Polish guard-post at the mouth...
A dashing young Italian in Poland finds himself caught between two women — a novitiate nun and a ruthless corporate ladder-climber — in this lacerating vision of contemporary Poland from master filmmaker Krzysztof Zanussi.
A young boy sends anonymous threats to various troublemakers around town, hoping that they will report themeselves to the police and grant his older brother, a militia officer a transfer to Warsaw.
A pastor and ethnographer visits a remote corner of 19th-century Lithuania where folk customs associated with the area's pagan past still have a hold on the population.
Shortly after World War II an American soldier (Norman) and a Polish refugee (Emilia) fall in love. Eventually he will return to the U.S. and both expect that she will soon follow him with her mother. Emilia's mother is sick, but will recover with the right medicine. But the mother, and not Emilia,...
Bearing traces of the old Anton Chekhov play The Wedding, The Contract is set during an "arranged" ceremony. The bride and groom barely know each other, but this matters not at all to their tradition-bound families. At the last minute, the bride balks. Only slightly nonplused, the groom's father, a...
In this mixture of fiction and documentary Krzysztof Zanussi invites a number of Poland’s great actors—Maja Komorowowska, Daniel Olbrychski, and Jan Nowicki—to "revisit" characters they played in the director's earlier works.
Set in the summer months preceding the September 1939 outbreak of World War II in Polish part of Lithuania. A young highschool lad, Witek, is hoping to pass the entrance exams to the university. His love interest is Alina, his high-school colleague.
Jerzy Stuhr wrote, directed, and starred in this drama about a man sworn to uphold the law who applies a very different moral code to himself than he does to others. As Adam Borowski, Stuhr plays a government lawyer prosecuting a variety of cases, including smuggling, theft, child abandonment, and...
A young man is confronted with corrupt and vindictive colleagues at work and negligent officials at the hospital where his mother is dying. As he searches quixotically for a steadfast moral code by which to live, he suffers from the knowledge of human frailty and our darker inclinations to do harm.
When it is discovered that the Zygmunt mine in Upper Silesia has been deemed unprofitable and is to be closed by flooding, the miners go on strike and a violent demonstration ensues.
A lonely Border Guard officer, with a girl and a former villain, has to face a local corrupt Militia commandant and his people in wild Bieszczady Mountains in the Polish East.
