Metrograph

Starry-eyed idealism runs smack into a wall of practical complexities and human stubbornness in Kieślowski’s first film to receive a direct to cinema release, in which a well-liked Party factotum, Stefan (Franciszek Pieczka), returns to the provincial town where he’d lived years previous with an assignment to supervise the construction of a chemical plant and ambitions to build it as a worker’s paradise, only to have the castles he’s building in the sky besieged by disenfranchised locals who resent such high-handed incursion and the inevitable blighting of the environment. A dive into the thickets of Polish bureaucracy in the Communist era, lent an unmistakable veracity thanks to the director’s apprenticeship in documentary.

Distributor: Janus Films