The film shows a new life waking up and the transformation of a female body which loses its former shape. The physical sensation becomes increasingly more distinct until the moment when the baby leaves the boundaries of the mothers body.

Blessed are the believers?! For the past 55 years, the Black Madonna of the Polish town of Częstochowa has been wandering from house to house, from fate to fate. A copy of the icon, cut down to a handy, portable size, can be rented for 24 hours for a private mass in one’s living room, at the hospital, or in prison. The presence of the miraculous image interrupts daily routines, evokes essential and existential questions of life. It’s about guilt and forgiveness, life on this earth and beyond, the hope of a miracle.
Director Marcin Janos Krawczyk follows the Saint’s convoy through contemporary Poland with great empathy. He finds moving episodes to give us insights into the lives of people wounded in body and soul, who are looking to religion for answers that real life refused to give them. The theme of the mother with whom one seeks reconciliation runs through the film like a thread. The combination of evocative music, long travellings, and the intimacy of encounters that are more like confessions creates a magnetic force that makes the film seem like a kind of cinematic pilgrimage.

Cornelia Klauß

The universal validity of an equation can be proved by axioms or assumed to be an axiom itself. A classic axiom describes an immediately evident or conventionally accepted principle or reference to such a principle. The principles on which Polish mathematics professor Henryk Fast’s love equation is based may be deduced by interpreting his erotic drawings. In any case, they suggest that Henryk Fast has more than abstract desires at his fairly advanced age. Henryk is a hopeless romantic and would quite simply like to find a woman. The search might be complicated by the fact that one’s own idea of reality doesn’t necessarily correspond to another person’s. In Henryk’s case the magnitude of this difference can be glimpsed occasionally, for example when his daughter, who lives in America, visits him. Henryk’s equation contains at least one unknown that makes this amiable gentleman’s life so special and tells a touching story of desire at old age, beyond “conventionally accepted” realities.

Claudia Lehmann