Dutch Daydreams, Polish Nightmares: Unusual Family Constellations at Kraków’s Mastercard OFF CAMERA

At this year’s Mastercard OFF CAMERA Festival in Kraków, six feature films made up a collection of works loosely linked by their thematic ties to families and their idiosyncrasies. Among them were Treat Her Like a Lady and main competitor award winner Renovation, which respectively follow a single mother and her two daughters, and a young woman who falls for a construction worker repairing her building.

German writer Erich Kästner formulated the following witticism in 1932: “Whatever happens, you must never sink so low as to drink from the cocoa you are pulled through.” Sandra from Amsterdam, the lead character in Dutch filmmaker Paloma Aguilera Valdebenito’s film Treat Her Like a Lady (2026), seems to have internalised that. The film was screened at the 19th Mastercard OFF CAMERA International Festival of Independent Cinema and received the FIPRESCI Prize. The singer and presenter Nienke Plas gives her role an incredible presence. Whatever fate and social hardships befall the single mother of two daughters, Sandra and her meisjes, Harrie and Stella, preserve their infectious humour, and above all, their dignity. They manage to do this even when the water is turned off during the hottest summer due to unpaid bills.

When the three have to vacate their brightly painted apartment right next to the city highway due to rent arrears and are assigned a hotel room for homeless families, Sandra does not despair. Instead, she buys the girls straw hats and colourful sunglasses for a leisure day at the city swimming pool. Sandra had long given her boyfriend and Stella’s father, with whom she sold illegally caught cod in the neighbourhood, the cold shoulder for infidelity: he has gotten another woman pregnant. Sandra’s older daughter, Harrie, brilliantly played by twelve-year-old Aimee Klaassenbos, is a rather serious girl with a comical talent nonetheless. She often looks stern, as if disapproving of her mother’s spontaneous actions. This gives the multifaceted film a crucially realistic foundation.

In 1984, the Detroit band The Temptations sang their hit song, “Treat Her Like a Lady” with a sense of hope: “In this world of liberation / It’s so easy to forget / That it’s so nice to have a man around / To lend a helping hand, you can bet, bet you can, baby”. A woman like Sandra no longer relies on the helping hand of a man, and it is a surprising and moving pleasure to watch her.

Valdebenito comes from a Chilean family; for her film, she processed her mother’s experiences, who worked as a cleaning lady in Amsterdam to support the family. At one of her jobs, Sandra calls her daughters into the bathroom of a wealthy family. Disgusted, she shows them the dirty toilet: rich people wouldn’t need to clean it, as they know that the staff would do it for them. However, Treat Her Like a Lady also softens the bitter lessons of a social study with humour, music, and candy-coloured overdrawings. It is this originality and complexity that makes Valdebenito’s second film after Out of Love (2016) a worthy FIPRESCI prize winner.

The Kraków festival draws attention to first and second feature films, including a few others. They competed in the main international section, titled “Making Way”, for the Andrzej Wajda Kraków Film Award, endowed with 25,000 USD. The main jury awarded Renovation (Renovacija, 2025), by Lithuanian filmmaker Gabrielė Urbonaitė, which is about a young couple who have just moved into their first own apartment. When freelance translator Ilona falls in love with a Ukrainian construction worker who is renovating the façade in front of her window, the relationship with her boyfriend, a city guide in Vilnius, threatens to fall apart.

The FIPRESCI jury had the same selection to review. Among the ten nominated works, there were a striking number with unusual family constellations. The 2025 Egyptian contribution Complaint No. 713317 (713317 شكوى رقم) by Yasser Shafiey tells the story of a faulty refrigerator and its disturbing effect on its owners, an older married couple with grown children. However, the director sticks to the traditional humour of Ephraim Kishon without really achieving it.

A strong black comedy in the bright light of the Croatian Adriatic coast is what Igor Jelinović has achieved with his debut film Honey Bunny (Koke, 2026). Inspired by an inheritance dispute in his own family, the director takes on the perspective of Tonina, a resolute and domineering Zagreb businesswoman in her fifties. Tonina already has her husband and silent daughter completely under control, and now she is trying to do the same with her younger sister Tatjana and her family. Immediately, in the opening scene at a rental car company, Snježana Sinovčić Šiškov as Tonina proves her rhetorical abilities when she knocks down the price on the car because of alleged artificial leather seats, in a torrent of feigned indignation.

She dreams of having the little house on the island of Hvar all to herself, which she has to share with her sister. When Tatjana learns of the manoeuvre, a showdown ensues between the two, filmed in a single long take on a staircase. The younger woman repeatedly runs up the steps to the older one and back down again, until she boldly crushes the contents of Tonina’s shopping bag. This is reminiscent of striking staircase scenes in British filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock’s film noirs, notably in Notorious (1946) and Suspicion (1941).

To ease her guilty conscience, Tonina uses her connections to get her nephew Igor, a 30-year-old journalist with a phlegmatic personality, a job. In Croatia, nobody really wants to work, says Jelinović, who presents a promising talent test with this Mediterranean tragicomedy. In the final scene, Tonina throws away a bag as if she wants to finally get rid of the family baggage.

Original women’s figures also populate Qatar-based Sudanese-Russian filmmaker Suzannah Mirghani’s debut film Cotton Queen (2025). The story is set in the cotton fields of Sudan, but due to the ongoing war, the filming had to be moved to Egypt. The young Nafisa (played by Mihad Murtada with an inner glow) is the granddaughter of Al-Sit, who receives the harvest daily. This matriarch, infamously known as the Cotton Queen, is said to have poisoned British soldiers during the colonial era. When an attractive businessman appears from London, wanting to sell genetically modified cotton seeds to the farmers, the community becomes restless. Mirghani’s highly poetic film brings Cupid to Nafisa, who is striving for self-determination, especially in matters of love. The majestic Nile River plays a leading role in the visuals. However, the film also addresses social criticism and important issues, such as female genital mutilation.

Polish filmmaker Emi Buchwald’s debut No Ghosts on Good Street (Nie ma duchów w mieszkaniu na dobrej, 2025) is about the emotional states of four siblings on the threshold of adulthood. The film, which has been widely acclaimed in Poland, was shot in Warsaw. Benek shares a large flat with his brother Franek. In the latter’s absence, Benek tends to panic attacks and dreams that a wraith would run over him at night and sit on his chest. Franek will not let himself be put under pressure and is looking for distance. This, in turn, occupies his twin sister Nastka so much that she becomes incapable of relationships. Their sister Jana comes into play as the fourth person.

The debut of 34-year-old Buchwald appears in large parts improvised and impressionistic, like the 1871 painting The Nightmare by Swiss artist Henry Fuseli, which shows a sleeping woman in a white nightgown being threatened by two monsters. This work of art already inspired the author of Frankenstein, English novelist Mary Shelley, and now it brings to sensitive Benek the corresponding dreams. Although the dialogue of the quartet seems a bit thin, No Ghosts on Good Street reveals a remarkable stylistic handwriting. With its floating romantic atmosphere, the film fits well into the elegant former royal city of Kraków.

Katrin Hillgruber

Edited by Olivia Popp

@FIPRESCI2026