Krzysztof Zanussi brings his sharpened poetic sensibility to the postwar generation of Poles struggling to bring purpose to their lives under Communism. The promises and struggles of love and physics set this kinetic and impressionistic film on a tailspin. Winner of Locarno’s Golden Leopard.
Through its hero’s eyes—and the travails of a righteous and honest man—we see, at the end of the 1970s, what’s become of the Communist dream. One of Zanussi’s most acclaimed films and the winner of the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
A 1971 Cannes contender from a Polish master, Krzysztof Zanussi’s taut chamber drama simmers with generational discontent. Airing out the moral rots that underpin a handsome ancestral home, Family Life reckons with the shackles of familial dysfunction—and a country in sociopolitical disarray.
In the cinema of Krzysztof Zanussi, livingly embodied & taut with the internal debates of a transforming society, the clash of Polish generations reaches its pinnacle in this richly erudite drama of debate. His usual university-educated protagonists are under his microscope—a microcosm of a nation.