SYNOPSIS
EWA (38), an acclaimed fashion photographer, is offered the chance to hold her first solo exhibition in Berlin. But the curator, HANS (52), rejects the photographs she brings: they are technically perfect but say nothing. He wants something personal - work in which the photographer finally exposes herself. He sets a condition: Ewa is to bring back something true, or the wall goes to someone else. She has one month.
Ewa has only one true story. Twenty years ago her sixteen-year-old sister, Maria, was murdered, and the killers were never found. To this day she has not freed herself from the feeling that she could have saved her. Maria is still with her - in the reflection of a windowpane, in the bed beside her, sitting in a chair reading a book.
Ewa decides to resume the project she abandoned at art school: staged photographs at the sites of unsolved murders of women. But she does not want to document violence. She wants to reveal the beauty of the victims - their faces, bodies, unfinished gestures - and make visible what remains after someone is gone. She gets the case files from PAWEŁ (48), her ex-husband the police detective who investigated Maria’s murder - she seduces him, drugs him to sleep, and copies the files from his computer.
She finds her model at a casting. NATASZA (21) fled Mariupol, lost her parents, and is barely getting by in Warsaw. The moment Ewa notices her, she knows this is the only possible model. Natasza refuses - twice. She agrees only when Ewa offers her ten thousand złoty.
The women set out on a journey through provincial Poland. The first session takes place in a forest: Natasza is to play a murdered woman found in the same place many years earlier. The young woman resists, pulls away and shouts that it is too much. But Ewa knows exactly what she is looking for: the moment when the model’s body stops performing and simply exists, when the victim regains a face. The session ends in an argument and the fee is raised to twenty thousand.
The following days bring the women closer: cigarettes in roadside car parks, toasted sandwiches at a petrol station, Natasza's first photographs, a kiss in a club, intended to scare off two pushy men, that unexpectedly becomes real.
But the world does not forget them. An accidental witness to the night shoot, convinced that he sees a murder, calls the police, who find the case files among the women’s belongings. Warned by the officers and afraid of losing his badge, Paweł sets off after them.
At the family summer house, Ewa enters the room where her sister was found for the first time in twenty years, and sees Maria walking away through the garden. This is their goodbye. The next morning Natasza opens the files and finds her own face in them. She realises she was chosen for her resemblance to Maria. Despite this, she stays - and sits Ewa down in front of the lens herself. The roles reverse: this time it is Ewa who poses as Maria. That evening, by the nearby lake, Natasza speaks about Mariupol for the first time, about her parents and mobile crematoria, and rests her head on Ewa's stomach. They lie on the pier in a silence that holds everything.
At a disco in a small town, Natasza is approached by ANDRIEJ (29), a tall, loud Russian-speaking man who openly supports Russian aggression. He picks up on her Ukrainian accent, yet despite it, or perhaps because of it, he immediately treats her like a prize to be won and refuses to take NO for an answer. When Natasza hears what he is saying, she can no longer hold back and throws her drink in his face. Ewa defuses the situation and gets her out of the club. The encounter triggers something in the Ukrainian woman that she has been suppressing for months.
That same night, Paweł catches up with the women in a car park, and Natasza, defending Ewa, smashes a bottle over his head. The women flee, taking Paweł's gun with them. As they speed through a dark forest, Ewa hits one of three deer that suddenly leap into the road. The photographer puts the dying animal out of its misery with Paweł's gun, then takes a photograph while crying.
The accident strands the women in a nearby town, where at dawn, in the fog, they overhear Andriej talking with two men. They suspect that the men are planning an act of sabotage intended to disrupt aid shipments to Ukraine. Natasza wants to go to the police; Ewa persuades her to get evidence first. Then Paweł appears again at the guesthouse, takes his gun and the files, and warns Natasza who she is dealing with. Despite this, Natasza once again decides to stay. Ewa stays too, and for the first time since Maria's death she does not want to merely watch: after years of feeling that she went silent and did nothing after Maria disappeared, she refuses to add another failure to act to the burden she already carries.
Following Ewa's plan, Natasza approaches Andriej first. The man, who has not hidden his attraction to her, follows the women to a bonfire on the grounds of a disused factory where the body of a murdered girl was found years ago. Ewa discreetly starts recording and keeps encouraging him to drink, while Natasza exploits his interest in her to draw out details of the operation.
Andriej becomes increasingly drunk and effusive. He boasts that he will be a hero and urges Natasza to run away with him. While dancing, he begins to grope her. Natasza breaks free and steps back, breathing heavily, and Ewa steps between them. An amused Andriej harasses her too. Ewa pushes him away with all her strength. Andriej falls, strikes his head on a stone and dies. Silence falls. Ewa takes control: she turns off the recording, takes latex gloves from the boot, tells Natasza to collect the bottles, and they throw the bloody stone into a pond. They find a canister of petrol in Andriej's car. Natasza decides to burn the car with the body inside. Ewa stands and watches, then takes out her camera and photographs the burning wreck.
At night, without Natasza’s knowledge, Ewa listens to the recording she supposedly deleted. Meanwhile, a wildfire fuelled by the summer heat exposes the wreck before any investigation does.
The women part at the border. Natasza returns to her war and leaves Ewa three rolls of film from her camera.
A month later, in a taxi in Berlin, Ewa hears on the radio that the railway line was sabotaged after all and those responsible remain at large. In the gallery, Ewa's large-scale stagings stand beside Natasza's raw frames, developed from the rolls of film she left behind. Hans stops at the photograph of the burned wreck and says that this one seems different, though he cannot say why. Ewa replies that all the photographs are real. When she is alone, she touches the glass over Natasza's portrait and notices a small white flare in the reflection, resembling a ghost.
