Weekend Stories: Deceptive Charm

A woman whose passport was denied under the previous Communist regime by a vindictive party secretary is given a chance to confront the woman and take revenge.

A rational young man and his devoutly Catholic wife believe their sickly son may have leukemia. As they await further tests over a weekend they both struggle with a crisis of faith in both science and Catholicism.

A classical singer who put his career on hold to raise a family gets a big break when a major company hires him for a televised New Year's Eve concert, but his shot at fame is threatened when, against his better judgment, he goes out on a rainy night and gets a cold.

A handsome young chauffeur hired by a powerful and charismatic businesswoman discovers he has been made an unwitting party to fraud, but his moral outrage is complicated: the married man allowed himself to be seduced by the woman, who threatens to tell the man's wife.

An aging ballet legend who defected to France years before returns home to Poland for the first time to appear in a charity performance, and he immediately clashes with his ex-wife, who stayed behind when he defected.

A young TV producer struggles with his conscience when he becomes convinced that his TV program is covering up a lie, but the more he tries to reveal the truth the more uncertainty he discovers.

Rose, an older woman living in Paris was born in Poland as a daughter of an aristocratic family. Her family house is now an impoverished home for the elderly.

The miniseries charts Napoleon Bonaparte’s career from his return after the Egyptian campaign to his downfall and exile on Elba, portraying his political maneuvering, military ambition, and complex relationships with key figures such as Talleyrand, Fouché, Murat, Tsar Alexander, Joséphine de Beauharnais, and Countess Marie Walewska.

Filip buys an 8mm movie camera when his first child is born. Because it's the first camera in town, he's named official photographer by the local Party boss. His horizons widen when he is sent to regional film festivals with his first works but his focus on movie making also leads to domestic strife and philosophical dilemmas.

A student who missed his final exam because of illness arrives at his professor's house to beg to be allowed to take it.

This is the true story about a group of Romani's (gypsy) in occupied Poland during World War II as they confront the atrocities and tragedies of a forgotten holocaust.

Under the leadership of an ex-footballer, a bunch of homeless men set up a football team and train hard to take part in the world championship.

A young man is confronted with corrupt and vindictive colleagues at work and negligent officials at the hospital where his mother is dying. As he searches quixotically for a steadfast moral code by which to live, he suffers from the knowledge of human frailty and our darker inclinations to do harm.

This harrowing tale of survival centers on Rose, a Masurian woman, whose German soldier husband was killed in the war, leaving her alone on their farm. A single woman had no defense against Russian soldiers who raped as a form of revenge, nor against plundering Poles who found themselves in desperate straits. Help arrives for Rose in the form of Tadeusz, a former officer in the Polish Home Army who deserted after he saw his wife raped and murdered by Russian troops and is attempting to hide his identity.

Two friends who used to study physics together are forced to make tough decisions as their lives take different paths.

Following the death of his mother in '80s Poland, 12-year-old Wojciech has taken the brunt of his stressed father's frustrations with him; the boy frequently gets punished via belt. Wojciech's father occasionally tries to, instead, bond with him, but soon snaps back to his short-fused habits. Apart from Wojciech's friend Bartek, no one does anything to help. Jump to present day, Wojciech is a furrow-browed journalist who spends most of his spare time spelunking alone. Just like his father, he has serious anger management issues. Fellow caver Tania feels inexplicably attracted to him, but the love of a good woman may not be enough.

Young homeless man Luke is not going to obey the laws established by his homeless colleagues, as well as the arbitrariness of the foreman when he finds himself in forced labor. But only resistance to his own kind does not give Luke anything: without housing and means of subsistence, and, finally, without basic rights to protect the individual, he no longer sees any light in this life.

In this mixture of fiction and documentary Krzysztof Zanussi invites a number of Poland’s great actors—Maja Komorowowska, Daniel Olbrychski, and Jan Nowicki—to "revisit" characters they played in the director's earlier works.

Difficulty of human relations in a 3-cornered tale: a neurotic woman, idealistic young man and his mother. Tomek is a clean-cut, high-minded geography student. He lives with his mother Zofia, a sensitive, practicing Catholic, like her son. When he meets Julia, a depressed woman older than he, he first tries to comfort her, then invites her to stay with him and his mother. Tomek makes a trip to West Berlin to visit his well-off father. He refuses to take money from him and looks for work as a house painter. Julia ends up in a rest home for treatment, while Tomek is trying to make their relationship work.

Rose, an older woman living in Paris was born in Poland as a daughter of an aristocratic family. Her family house is now an impoverished home for the elderly.

The story of catholic saint Maximilian Kolbe (1894-1941), who volunteered to die in place of a stranger in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz.

A story about Janina Duszejko, an elderly woman, who lives alone in the Klodzko Valley where a series of mysterious crimes are committed. Duszejko is convinced that she knows who (or what) is the murderer, but nobody believes her.