Director

Jan Komasa

Poland, France | 2019 | 116 min | Polish with subtitles in English and Arabic

• Producer Leszek Bodzak, Aneta Hickinbotham
• Production Company Aurum Film
• Screenplay Mateusz Pacewicz
• Cinematography Piotr Sobocinski Jr.
• Editing Przemyslaw Chruscielewski
• Sound Kacper Habisiak, Marcin Kasinski, Tomasz Wieczorek
• Cast Bartosz Bielenia, Eliza Rycembel, Aleksandra Konieczna, Tomasz Zietek
• Contacts

  New Europe Film Sales

  jan@neweuropefilmsales.com

About the Film

What is faith? And how can we bet on it to redeem tormented souls? Where is the line between salvation, sacrifice, curse, and vengeance among the pretentious? These are the provocative questions posed by Jan Komasa’s third film, as he sends his protagonist Daniel (a remarkable performance by Bartosz Bielenia) down an abyss of dark paradoxes, leading him into the heart of the Polish countryside where the Catholic Patriarchate controls the local people, who live in an interdependent but highly incompatible world.

Overwhelmed with the tragedy of an accident that led to the loss of their loved ones, the villagers come together in longing for a divine sign that can put an end to their suffering.

That sign is presented through a 20-year-old criminal who succeeds in escaping detention, only to be consumed by the game of hiding under a robe he stole, in the village’s humble church. He introduces himself as Reverend Tomas, an envoy ready to lead their troubled souls, in order to avoid "slavery" in a carpentry workshop.

Inspired by real events, Komasa formulates a narrative rich with insolent and surprising situations; from the violent acts of inmates against a young man, to the stunning scene where Daniel goes through a dramatic change because his salvation among the villagershas not reached the depth of his humanity. Whenever he seeks to escape his sins, his past returns to the forefront—sometimes through a former inmate trying to blackmail him, or through the return of a reformist priest, seeking to send him back to punishment and be rewarded for discovering Daniel’s infamous theft.

Daniel, who "imitates" what he has learned from the priest, unwittingly forces the people to "have faith" in his "miracles" and to follow his "liberal way of worshiping and addressing the Lord." However, when he defies the villagers’ resistance, he is brutally confronted by his own bizarre question: How does the perpetrator view his own sins?

Ziad Al Khozai