Even without arms the hero of this film is a passionate skier and high board diver – and a brilliant painter, too.

With his shovel-like hands the Silesian miner Bernard Bugdoł became a working class hero and the great white hope of the new socialist Poland of the 1950s.

Paweł Łoziński follows the Jewish writer Henryk Grynberg as he returns from the U.S. to his native Polish village where his father was killed by his own neighbours.

1988: for 36 years the twin sisters have been loading and unloading bricks every day.

Of scarce commodities and disappointed hopes: the queues in front of the shops reveal the social stagnation. People queue up endlessly to get anything. No matter what.

Krzysztof Kieślowski unmasks the prototype of the informer and opportunist (in a totalitarian society) exclusively from the latter’s own perspective.

An engineer has to justify himself to a committee for professional and personal misconduct. There’s got to be a reason why norms weren’t fulfilled.

In 1968 the accountant Ryszard Siwiec publicly burned himself to death at the Warsaw stadium in protest against the Soviet invasion of Prague. But nobody was interested at the time.

On Sunday the car is taken out of the garage to be washed, the family meet to exchange many kisses and a few shots, the secret lovers come into their own behind the shrubs.

Silent people in a queue, silent people behind the windows of a bus – only apathy keeps the Polish people together. An impressionist appraisal of the end-of-days mood of the 1980s.

Hammer, chisel, swab... During a brutal 24-hour shift in a Warsaw hospital the fight against material shortages and lack of sleeps takes on surrealist traits, occasionally reminding us of the Muppet Show.

“Big Brother” at the camping site: a competition for the best family is announced at the company camping holiday. The prize: a washing machine.

Disobedient children and adolescents in the poor Warsaw district of Praga Nord – left to their own devices, but very creative in the use of the camera the director puts at their disposal. A brutally honest social study from inside.

Fatherland, family, religion. In 2007 many people still believed the extreme right militant All-Polish Youth movement was a bunch of crackpots.

Young girls rehearse “Cinderella” in an adolescent psychiatric hospital. Through playful interviews Marek Piwowski comes painfully close to their real family backgrounds: an intense study of abuse and the lack of social perspective.

Mother, father, children, animals, and their daily work. The simple rural life between idyll and isolation, in images that stand for themselves.