The Polish Kinoteka 2023 Film Festival returns and we start with the release of ILLUSION, which will also appear on Netflix shortly after. Director Marta Minorowicz (the well known crafter of ZUD) returns with a mystery drama. Its premise is simple. A teacher is in class and spies a girl outside. She excuses herself and leaves to see the girl, who is gone when she gets there. That teacher is a mother. The girl is her missing daughter. It has been months and the investigation is on ice and she is bereft. So i her husband but he is a suspect. So is the girls boy friend. So is an unknown number of others. So far, so expectation are high. You get the framing, tight and toned. So visual. The greyscale and that muted colour is everywhere and here to. There are keys, the mother Hanna (Agata Buzek) is a wall of stoic self destruction. Lost to the world.

The mother hires a private investigator and that begins her own increasingly irrational investigation. The finding of a button, the seeing of the shadow of a girl, the noise in the wind. Seemingly spiralling into a zone of wants and needs, desires and fears. We have moments of reality, ultimately leading to places that are not what we expect and we guess are those of the truth and lies. ILLUSIONS as I am led to believe, is in its native Polish a more loaded word. This possibly tips you off to what to really expect here. The frame is heavy, like its predecessor, which was a meditative and slightly laboured. Here it decays with the mothers own sense of grief and trauma. We aren’t in a safe space, nor are we ever going to be. Though it meanders and never fully realises the intense space it inhabits, it does leave you thinking, log after the cinema days hurry you into the night…

Kinoteka Polish Film Festival 2023 takes place in venues across London 9 March – 27 April