AGATA KULESZA

NEVER GONNA SNOW AGAIN (2021)
Starring Alec Utgoff, Weronika Rosati, Agata Kulesza, Maja Ostaszewska, Katarzyna Figura, Borys Szyc and Jaroslaw Milner. Directed by Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert.

One grey, foggy morning, a mysterious young man, Zhenia, crosses the border from Ukraine into Poland, carrying only a massage table. When faced with a staid official at Warsaw’s immigration office, he secures the necessary residence permit by simply taking the man’s head in his huge, soft hands and massaging him into a trance.

Zhenia soon establishes himself with the well-to-do residents of a suburban gated community of identical white McMansions, where his unique talents quickly become in demand. Among the clientele are Maria, who finds a calm in Zhenia that her hostile children and husband don’t provide; derisive widow Ewa who lusts after the masseur in more ways than she’ll dare admit; a woman obsessed by her three bulldogs who pleads for them to also be treated, and Wika, who has invested the last hopes for her cancer-stricken husband in Zhenia’s seemingly magical fingertips. But as he navigates through the affairs, drinking, drug-taking and games of neighbourly one-upmanship, no one thinks to ask Zhenia about his own concerns, least of all his mysterious origins.

COLD WAR (2018)
Starring Joanna Kulig, Tomasz Kot, Borys Szyc, Agata Kulesza, Cédric Kahn, Jeanne Balibar, Adam Woronowicz, Adam Ferency and Adam Szyszkowski. Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski.

A passionate love story between a man and a woman who meet in the ruins of post-war Poland. With different backgrounds and temperaments, they are fatally mismatched and yet fatefully condemned to each other. Set against the background of the Cold War in the 1950s in Poland, Berlin, Yugoslavia and Paris, the couple are separated by politics, character flaws and unfortunate twists of fate – an impossible love story in impossible times.

REVIEWS Cold War - Poles apart

THE INNOCENTS (2017)
Starring Lou De LaÂge, Agata Kulesza, Agata Buzek, Vincent MacAigne, Joanna Kulig, Eliza Rycembel, Katarzyna Dąbrowska, Anna Próchniak, Helena Sujecka and Mira Maludzińska. Directed by Anne Fontaine.

It's December 1945, and the Second World War is finally over. Mathilde, a young French Red Cross doctor, finds herself in Warsaw treaEng the last of the French soldiers returning from the front. One night, a nun appears at the clinic, begging Mathilde to follow her back to the convent on urgent business. What Mathilde finds there is shocking: a holy sister about to give birth. As Mathilde enters the sisters' fiercely private world, secrets rise to the surface, and modernism and science clash with faith and tradiEon. The nuns go about their strict daily rituals, but inside the convent's chilly stone walls, echoing with their melancholic chants, a dangerous revoluEon is taking place.

REVIEWS The Innocents - A heart-wrenching story of brutality, faith and resolve

IDA (2014)
Starring Agata Trzebuchowska, Agata Kulesza, Dawid Ogrodnik, Joanna Kulig, Adam Szyszkowski, Jerzy Trela, Artur Janusiak, Dorota Kuduk, Halina Skoczyńska and Natalia Lagiewczyk. Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski.

Poland 1962. Anna is a beautiful eighteen-year-old woman, preparing to become a nun at the convent where she has lived since orphaned as a child. She learns she has a living relative she must visit before taking her vows, her mother’s sister Wanda.

Together, the two women embark on a voyage of discovery of each other and their past. Her aunt, she learns is not only a former hard-line Communist state prosecutor notorious for sentencing priests and others to death, but also a Jew.