Lazowski, an expelled university student, investigates the supposed suicide of the famous artist Witkacy and tries to prove that the artist is in fact still alive.
Acting
Jerzy & Maciej Stuhr: real father-son playing philosophical doppelgängers.
Direction
Koprowicz channels paranoid 1950s Poland through fractured reality.
Writing
Witkacy's actual philosophy weaponized as narrative puzzle.
Director
Jacek Koprowicz
Jerzy Stuhr
Witkacy
Maciej Stuhr
Łazowski
Ewa Błaszczyk
Czesława Okińska
Karolina Gruszka
Zuza
Mariusz Benoit
Colonel
Andrzej Chyra
major SB
Ewa Dałkowska
Jadwiga - Witkacy's wife
Ewa Kasprzyk
'Lolobrygida' / Patti
Olgierd Łukaszewicz
Witkiewicz
Jerzy Nowak
Askenazy
Wojciech Pszoniak
Pinno
Roman Gancarczyk
Recepction's boss
Katarzyna Gniewkowska
Shop assistant in 'Desa'
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Jerzy Stuhr spent months studying Witkacy's actual paintings and manic philosophical treatises to build the character's physicality.
Witkacy's 1939 'suicide' into Soviet-occupied Poland was itself a decades-long cultural mystery; the film literalizes how Polish artists became ghosts under communism.
PL
