A watch, a jacket, a few mugs in a cupboard. That is all that remains of a man hanging from the ceiling of his own flat. In What Belongs to Others (Cudze rzeczy), Polish filmmaker Grzegorz Dębowski keeps a quiet ledger of loneliness, observing people who, like moths, gravitate towards even the faintest glimmers of warmth. Recently awarded the Warsaw Grand Prix at the 42nd Warsaw International Film Festival, the narrative begins with seemingly harmless shoplifting and temptations of easy money, which soon give way to something like a macabre, romantic enchantment.
Kasia (Monika Sabina Kwiatkowska) and her partner (Roberta Mania), are Warsaw’s “bicycle thieves”: small-time grifters on the peripheries of Polish precarity. During one break-in, the woman finds the door ajar; inside, the owner’s belongings have been packed into cardboard boxes, ready to move out along with his body. Despite the grim discovery, Kasia begins following dispersed addresses, gradually piecing together a portrait of the deceased – a person she never had the chance to know, yet who seems to grow closer to her with every scene.
Dębowski shifts the focus from the dead man’s story towards an attempt to come to terms with one’s own isolation. Kasia’s exploitation of others is parasitic, yet somehow soothes old wounds, briefly reconciling those in conflict. Inhabiting the life she inherited from the stranger, she finds a way, however briefly, to escape her own. For a woman evicted from a former relationship, with no room left for closeness, a new identity becomes a desperate struggle hidden beneath the facade. Kasia spends her life taking things that belong to others, but what she ultimately longs for cannot simply be stolen.
Lingering on the unremarkable textures of everyday life, the director focuses attention on a reality yet to be cinematically mined. The camera trails the protagonist in unhurried, wandering movements, lending the story a quasi-documentary quality. An anthropology of things and card index of loneliness portrays Warsaw’s provincial newcomers with no settled address, mockingly dubbed “jar people” for the jars of home-cooked food that tie them to the places they left. Everyday Poland, stripped of the sugar-coated illusion of prosperity, has rarely been prescribed as such a bitter pill.
Yet this dreariness comes at a price. It is hard to feel at home among What Belongs to Others – a world of leftovers served generously, yet cold. Misfortune piled upon misery can become oppressive, even more for the lack of any flicker of light, any crack for warmth to seep in. One question remains: what is it like to walk in a dead man’s shoes? And who, eventually, will be curious enough to inhabit the absence we leave behind?
Director: Grzegorz Dębowski
Writer: Grzegorz Dębowski
Cast: Monika Sabina Kwiatkowska, Robert Mania, Ewa Pająk, Martyna Rozwadowska, Aleksandra Kolan, Jadwiga Grygierczyk, Marcin Kiszluk
Running Time: 105 minutes
Country: Poland
Year: 2026
Karolina Zdunek
©FIPRESCI 2026