Polish cinema has had a strong relationship with the Venice International Film Festival for decades, but its presence on the Lido has been noticeable in recent years. In 2022, Damian Kocur’s Bread and Salt (Chleb i sól) competed in Orizzonti and won the Special Jury Prize, with Kocur turning an ordinary summer in a small Polish town into a painfully convincing portrait of prejudice, masculinity and how quickly hostility can grow inside a community. A year later, Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border (Zielona granica) entered the main competition and received the Special Jury Prize for its uncompromising account of the humanitarian crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border, while Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert’s Woman of… (Kobieta z…) also competed for the Golden Lion. Go further back, and you find Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Blue, which shared the Golden Lion in 1993, while the 2026 festival is also returning Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds from 1958 to its restored classics programme.

These films may be very different, but they show how well Polish filmmakers can turn difficult subjects into compelling stories. Selected for the Orizzonti competition at the festival, Grzegorz Dębowski’s What Belongs to Others follows Kasia, a woman who has spent so much time simply getting by that she has perhaps never stopped to think about what she actually wants from life.

Kasia, played by Monika Sabina Kwiatkowska, makes her living breaking into apartments with her boyfriend. During one burglary, she discovers the body of a man who has died alone. Her boyfriend is subsequently arrested, leaving Kasia on her own, and she returns to the dead man’s flat. At first, her reasons are hardly noble; she sees an opportunity to get hold of his money and other possessions. She eventually begins pretending to be his partner, but the longer she remains inside his life, the more interested she becomes in the person who once occupied it. She meets people who knew him, discovers relationships and fragments of his past and, somewhere inside this increasingly complicated lie, begins imagining a different future for herself.

It is a wonderful contradiction on which to build a film; Kasia enters somebody else’s home intending to take things, yet what she eventually finds there cannot really be stolen.

Kasia lies, steals and takes advantage of situations that most people would find morally unacceptable, and Dębowski leaves us to make up our own minds about her as he gives us enough time with her to see that doing bad things does not necessarily make someone a bad person.

Kasia is not waiting for anyone to save her, and when her boyfriend is arrested and she suddenly finds herself on her own, she begins to realise that she is far more capable than she may have believed. It seems like a small change at first, but it raises a much bigger question about how often we stay in lives that make us unhappy simply because they are familiar and changing them is more frightening than staying where we are.

Changing your life is one of those ideas that sounds much easier when spoken aloud. We tell ourselves that if we are unhappy, we should leave, find another job, end a relationship, call somebody we miss, move somewhere else or simply start again. But knowing that another life is possible and actually choosing it are very different things. Familiar unhappiness can sometimes be safer than an uncertain future; Kasia understands how to break into an apartment long before she understands how to break out of the life she has built for herself.

Loneliness is everywhere in the film, from someone dying alone in an apartment to families who have simply stopped talking to one another. Strangely, it is Kasia and the lie she creates that bring some of these people together again. She enters their lives for the wrong reasons, but the connections that follow become real, giving her some of the most human moments of her life.

Dębowski also chose to work with lesser-known theatre actors rather than familiar faces, giving performers who are rarely seen on the big screen a chance to take the lead. It works very well with Monika Sabina Kwiatkowska, as her performance is superb.

Cinematographer Stanisław Horodecki also works with long takes, which I truly appreciated.

While watching the film, I also wondered about the title itself: what actually belongs to us? Ownership is quite hard to define in this film, which raises another question: Can you inherit another person’s loneliness? Can you briefly occupy somebody else’s place in the world and discover something truthful about yourself while doing it? Kasia cannot become the person she pretends to be, nor can she simply take the dead man’s life and make it hers. What she can take from it is the knowledge that her present life is not the only one available to her, and that may be the most difficult thing the film has to say.

Many of us dream about changing our lives, but perhaps the real problem is not whether change is possible, it is whether we are willing to tolerate everything that comes with it. Kasia’s circumstances are extreme, but the fear underneath them is not; sometimes it takes seeing somebody else’s life, or in her case, literally stepping inside it, to realise how little of our own life we have consciously chosen.

What do you really take away from the film itself? I think you discover that simply being human is difficult and valuable enough. Without a doubt, this is a brilliant piece of cinema!

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Written by Maggie Gogler

Featured image courtesy of Venice Film Festival

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