FILM WORLD
The film lives in the tension between two landscapes which appear to have nothing in common, yet in reality feed on each other.
FASHION WORLD
Warsaw, Milan, Berlin. Palace interiors where models pose at tables laden with fruit and roasted meats. Photography studios with sterile whiteness. Contemporary art galleries with stone-faced curators. This is a world where everything is perfect: lighting, makeup, framing. It is a world of beautiful lies. Ewa is at home here, but increasingly feels like a guest in her own life, because beneath the smooth surface there is nothing, and that is precisely what the curators accuse Ewa of.
PROVINCIAL POLAND
Roadside motels with unfashionable furnishings. Petrol stations and car parks. Forest roads in the fog. Car workshops with calendars from erotic magazines on the walls. Nightclubs in small towns where people drink warm shots and dance to 90s disco music. This world does not pretend: it is raw, concrete, physical. Everything that matters happens here: intimacy, conversations about painful pasts, a shot to a wounded deer, a killing by a bonfire.
CONTRAST IS A TOOL
This is not a film about fashion being false and the provinces authentic. It is about a woman who spent years building a career in a world she can control and who, to find herself, ventures into a world where her control does not work. Ewa leaves Warsaw in a black jeep that looks like a prop from a commercial. She returns in a car hammered out at a village mechanic's, with dust on the dashboard and the smell of petrol in her hair. Her entire transformation fits between those two cars. But these two distant worlds finally meet. Ewa returns to the Berlin gallery, where she once brought technically perfect but emotionally empty pictures, with the truth in the form of new photographs.
There is, however, a third world
WORLD OF GHOSTS
Between fashion and the provinces exists a third layer: the world to which Maria belongs. Reflections in windows. The empty side of a bed with a still-warm impression. A curtain moving in the window of a summer house. This world has no locations of its own: it overlays the other two, penetrating their fabric. Ghosts accompany the protagonists throughout the story. Ewa confronts the ghost of her dead sister, while Natasza confronts the ghosts of the war she survived.
