Imagine the last day of your life has dawned. What will stand up to review? What brings contentment? What brings regrets? “Vika!” is a film about the value of life and self-discovery, inspiring us to reflect on one’s chosen path and its forks and to stay true to oneself.

Vika, the 84-year-old main protagonist, a mother and grandmother several times over, looks back on a difficult childhood and many years of working in a “proper” job. When she retired, she seized the opportunity to reinvent herself. She became a DJ and star of the Warsaw nightclubs, who regularly drives her young audience wild. Super cool? Inappropriate for an elderly lady? Agnieszka Zwiefka’s portrait deconstructs the borders between the “acceptable” and “unacceptable” roles of a woman who refuses to acknowledge her age. Vika wants to live in the moment, with no ties to the past. Zwiefka combines elements of music and narrative documentary films and creates an enchanting, immediately accessible and utopian world. Dancing to Vika’s rhythms means freeing yourself from the limitations dictated by society, age and sometimes even one’s own children.

An Instagram user surface ripples, turns into a feedback vortex and attempts to impress in virtual space. Every segment is an aesthetically arranged repetition. We catch a brief glimpse of the alleged visual content: in a film studio, equipment and a white background are lurking for their photographic object. Absence is staged as a motif that feeds the vain social media channel.

You need momentum to escape it all. Vonfelt packs the necessary energy into unstoppable pop beats and verbal images. On a backdrop of fleeting nocturnal city lights, Michelle Brand creates a refreshingly dynamic slipstream of fading forms and intense colours. You let yourself fall gently and with a smile into the rush of acceleration.