The whole world, captured on a somewhat dreary pavement in Warsaw. For two years, director Paweł Łoziński stood on the balcony of his flat with his camera and watched the people passing below from up there. The ones he saw and persuaded to talk are young and old, neighbours or simply passers-by. The filmmaker addresses them, asks questions, listens and creates a space for conversations that rarely happen between strangers.

How do passers-by react when they are filmed from a balcony and addressed, stopped from above? Do they walk on, shaking their heads? Or are they willing to engage in dialogue? This place and this staged opportunity seem perfect for making a film that reflects its own premises, because apparently people feel a rather strong need to talk about themselves from this unusual position. Whether hurrying or strolling, happy or thoughtful, posing or quite natural: Each of the participants who happen to come into view reveals something special. Every encounter, however unpremeditated, turns out to be unique. Some expectations of a certain type of person are disappointed, because hardly anyone can be pigeonholed. Łoziński’s experiment invites us to pause, to wait until the world steps into the camera’s field of view.

A young man meets a young woman and both fall for each other. A house is built, children are born, the fairy tale story of boundless love takes its course. A grandson sets out to explore the myth of his grandparents’ romance and tries to honour his deceased grandfather on film, assisted by all the surviving relatives. Not an easy undertaking when things may not have been exactly as the family tradition would have it …

In his search Rocco Di Mento unearths old 8mm home movies, an unpublished novel, various love letters and a whole host of long-suppressed feelings. It’s hardly surprising that this mixture begins to develop a dynamic of its own. Suddenly the issue is no longer only the search for the love of one’s life but also the questions of what holds people together above and beyond their relationship status and degree of kinship and how forgiveness is possible even though you have long since lost faith in it. An ingeniously constructed family constellation full of Italian temperament, in which tension, emotion and truthfulness are inextricably linked. Because: “Even if you leave you will always be part of your family.”