SYNOPSIS
Ewa (38), an acclaimed fashion photographer, faces a turning point in her career. With the help of Karolina, the Polish assistant to a curator, she has secured a meeting about her first solo exhibition at Hans Lypke's prestigious Berlin gallery. But when Ewa shows Hans her work, his verdict is merciless: her photographs are technically flawless but emotionally empty. Still, the curator sees real potential in her and gives her a month to deliver new material proving she can make moving images, not merely beautiful fashion shoots. Either Ewa shows him something real, or Hans will replace her.
// synopsis
Determined, Ewa returns to a project she abandoned nearly twenty years earlier while studying at the Academy of Fine Arts. It is a series of staged photographs made at sites of unsolved murders of women. Yet Ewa does not want to document violence. She wants to show the victims' beauty: their faces, their bodies, their unfinished gestures. She wants to make visible what remains when someone is gone. The project is deeply personal to her: Ewa's younger sister, Maria, was raped and murdered as a teenager. Her killer was never found. Maria's ghost still follows Ewa, appearing in a window reflection, lying beside her in bed with headphones on, humming a song neither of them has forgotten. She also appears in the camera lens when Ewa takes photographs. She is not a memory. She is a presence.
After years of silence, Ewa goes to the apartment of Paweł (48), her former husband and a police detective who led Maria's case but never solved it. Paweł reluctantly opens the door. Yet he clings to the hope that Ewa wants to come back and try again. Ewa seduces him and they make love. When he leaves the room, she slips sleeping pills into his wine. After Paweł falls asleep, Ewa copies the unsolved case files from his computer onto a USB stick and leaves.
At a casting for another fashion project, Ewa notices a girl who does not fit in with the rest: delicate, slightly strange, as if she does not belong to the modelling world. Instead of looking at her phone, she takes pictures of herself with an analogue camera. She is Natasza (21), a Ukrainian woman from Mariupol who lost her family in Russian shelling and desperately needs work to survive in Warsaw. Ewa invites her to join the project. Natasza refuses twice; she fled violence and does not want to return to it. She agrees only when Ewa offers to pay her.
The women set out on a journey through provincial Poland. During their first shoot in the woods, Natasza is meant to lie naked on the ground with strangulation marks painted on her body and her hands and feet tied. She rebels, pulls away and shouts that it is too much. But Ewa knows what she is looking for: the moment when the model's body stops acting and simply is. The moment when the victim regains her face.
After a difficult start, the women's relationship grows closer with every day on the road: a toasted sandwich with ketchup at a petrol station, cigarettes in a car park beside an old tank, conversations about the past, Natasza's first photographs. These moments bring them together. At the Piramida club, under strobe lights and the influence of MDMA, they kiss for the first time. What begins as a provocation meant to free them from the attention of two pushy men becomes something real.
But the world around the women begins to close in. One night, as they recreate a crime scene at a small scrapyard, the police stop them and find files from Paweł's computer in their possession. The officers take them to the station and, while checking the system, learn about Ewa's former husband. That night, one of them calls Paweł to tell him that his ex-wife has been detained and that documents were found with her. Paweł lies that he has had no contact with Ewa for years, but he guesses what she has done and that her appearance at his door after all this time was no accident. He hires a hacker to trace her phone, then sets off on a motorcycle to chase the women, take back the files and close the matter. He knows that mishandling and losing those documents could cause him serious trouble.
In the summer house where Maria's body was found almost twenty years earlier, Natasza persuades Ewa that this time she should pose for the photographs. Ewa agrees. Yet these are entirely different pictures from those she once made at art school, when she could not complete her degree. While staying at the place where her sister's body was found, Ewa sees Maria's ghost through the window. The girl smiles and walks away. It is their symbolic farewell. By the nearby lake, Natasza tells Ewa about Mariupol, mobile crematoria and how she stopped being afraid of bodies in the streets. Then she 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, a large, loud Russian-speaking nationalist who supports Russia's actions in Ukraine. He hears her accent, likes what he sees and immediately treats her as prey. When Natasza hears his lewd remarks, she snaps and throws a shot over him. Ewa, trying to defuse the situation, pulls Natasza out of the club. The encounter unleashes something in the Ukrainian woman that she has been suppressing for months.
Guided by the hacked location of Ewa's phone, Paweł catches up with the women in a car park behind a bar. He hits Ewa, and Natasza, defending her, smashes a bottle over his head. The women escape, taking Paweł's service weapon with them. As they speed through a dark forest, Ewa hits one of three deer that suddenly run into the road. With tears in her eyes, she puts the dying animal out of its misery using Paweł's gun. Despite her grief, she photographs Natasza standing over the deer in the headlights.
With the help of a tow truck, the women reach the nearest town and are forced to spend several days there while they wait for parts and repairs. On the way to a shoot, they overhear a conversation between three men, including Andriej. From the fragments Natasza catches, she concludes that Andriej plans to blow up railway tracks to cut off military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. On one man's arm, she also recognizes a tattoo symbolizing a nationalist militia from Mariupol. Natasza explains everything to Ewa, who wants more details before they go to the police. Frustrated, Natasza throws a question in her face: does Ewa want another guilty conscience? After their argument, they return to the guesthouse, where Paweł finds them. He takes back the files and tells Natasza that nobody can destroy others the way Ewa can. Despite the fracture in their trust, the women decide on one final shoot.
After thinking it over, Ewa agrees to help Natasza stop the nationalists' plan. She suggests persuading Andriej to go with them to an isolated place, where they can try to get more information out of him. Despite her fear, Natasza agrees. That evening, the women find Andriej and follow him. Outside one of the bars, a mysterious man gets into Andriej's car. From a distance, the women watch money and documents change hands. When Andriej is alone again, they drive up to him and suggest going somewhere secluded with them.
By a bonfire on the grounds of an abandoned factory, Andriej drinks heavily and quickly. He boasts and tries to impress Natasza, then starts groping her. She cannot take it any longer and pushes him away. Andriej falls onto a stone and dies. Terrified, Natasza wants to run, but Ewa stays cold-blooded: she knows they cannot leave any traces. Natasza suggests burning the body. She pours petrol over the car and sets it alight. Ewa stands and watches. Then she takes out her camera and photographs the burning wreck: the artist who wanted to restore dignity to victims documents a victim she helped create.
Several dozen kilometres away, in an anonymous motorway hotel, Natasza is still horrified by what she has done. Ewa tries to calm her and convince her that no one will connect them to what happened. But Natasza insists that she cannot stay in Poland; she fears someone will discover that she has blood on her hands. Even though there is a war in Ukraine, at least there she knows who she is. The next day, every television channel reports that Putin has been poisoned and tensions across Europe are rising.
Seeing the face of the murdered Putin on the screen makes Natasza feel even more strongly that she must return. The women part at the Polish-Ukrainian border, where Ewa tells Natasza that she has fallen in love with her. Devastated, Natasza leaves Ewa the film from her camera. Meanwhile, Polish and Russian investigations into Andriej's burned-out car begin.
A month later, Ewa stands in a Berlin gallery during the final preparations for the opening of her dream exhibition. Her staged photographs, two metres by two metres, hang on the walls, interspersed with raw analogue images taken by Natasza. The beauty of the victims and the beauty of the woman who looked at them. Hans says it is extraordinary material. When he asks about the model, Ewa says she has returned to her war. When the photographer is alone, a courier knocks at the gallery door. Inside an envelope addressed with her name, she finds a photograph of the burned wreck and a note: "Congrats on your show." Ewa freezes. Someone knows what she has done.
