Janusz (Daniel Olbrychski) is dragged away from Christmas Eve festivities by his former lover Ewa (Maria Pakulnis), who asks for his help in finding her missing husband. As they wander around Warsaw together, it transpires that Ewa might have ulterior motives. Meanwhile, Janusz’s wife (Joanna Szczepkowska) is waiting for him to return home.
Dekalog has achieved that rare feat of being a foreign-language feature that is internationally popular, not only with film critics, but also with the viewing public. How exactly did this 10-part cycle, originally made for television in communist Poland and loosely based around the Ten Commandments, find such success? The answer lies in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s ability to transplant broader moral dilemmas into the everyday lives of its characters, to dramatise rather than dictate reality, to find the universal resonance in seemingly local issues – and to do all of this with a strikingly mature aesthetic, hitherto unseen on most television sets.
Film will be available via ICA Cinema 3 between 16 May - 23 May.
