The Lucky Ones

It has been 43 years since Krzysztof Kieślowski directed his documentary film The Offce, depicting the work of the Civil Registry Office. Tomasz Wolski attempts to take a closer look at a similar institution but from a different perspective. He is not interested in the work of the stiff bureaucratic machinery, which in Kieślowski’s film was a subtle metaphor for the totalitarian system. The young director instead inspects the formalities and rituals to see in them a humanistic dimension. There are heaps of applicants coming to the local office in the Krakow district of Nowa Huta. They are of different ages and all come to register the most important moments of their lives: births, marriages, divorces, and deaths. Wolski records this procession of life and death with warmth and humour, and also with a philosophical meditation over the vicissitudes of human destiny.