Wojciech Sanejko

Zofia, a professor of ethics, is visited by Elżbieta, an American researching the fate of Jews who survived World War II. A daytime classroom conversation turns into a night of confrontation, and Zofia is forced to answer for a decision she made decades ago that directly affected the course of Elżbieta’s life.

Told as a film within the film, the story concerns an aging actress. Ewa is a flamboyant, pushy actress whose career and love life have come to a dead end. She lives in a faceless housing development. She is totally engrossed in herself and dreams of making a comeback as a singer. But her overbearing personality time after time sets her into conflict with those she tries to work with in the theater and her bedroom.

In the villa of the party dignitary, the fates of Stanisław, his son's friends, Zbyszek, a worker leaving the army, and the head of the thieves' gang, cross. The film was shelved by the censors for 27 years before finally getting a limited release in 2009.

This film is a sequel to Munk's Zezowate Szczescie and it's much the same, only more so. The film begins in a cinema, where the last scenes of Zezowate Szczescie are being shown. Born unlucky, a victim of the errors and distortions of Stalinism, he is released in 1956. He meets a politically feverish woman, her influential parents, and finally becomes the father of her child. But bad luck, or perhaps an unlucky era, will not let him forget.

Originally made for Polish television, “The Decalogue” focuses on the residents of a housing complex in late-Communist Poland, whose lives become subtly intertwined as they face emotional dilemmas that are at once deeply personal and universally human. Its ten hour-long films, drawing from the Ten Commandments for thematic inspiration and an overarching structure, grapple deftly with complex moral and existential questions concerning life, death, love, hate, truth, and the passage of time.