The best Elżbieta Karkoszka’s movies

A small group of cosmic explorers leave Earth to find freedom and start a new civilization.

One of the biggest Polish film premieres of 2012 and eagerly anticipated for over a decade, it is the story of the late 90s generation and the three friends behind the music: Magik, Focus and Rahim. The fact-based film directed by Leszek Dawid charts the relentless struggle for success of Paktofonika, against the backdrop of crumbling traditional values in dreary 90s Silesia. The contradictory ideals of hiphop - the rebellious, edgy lyrics against the ‘system’ juxtaposed with the money and fame sought by the artists - are superbly captured in this dark, unforgettable drama.

A young man in his twenties leaves prison after a three-year sentence. He wants to start a new life in a place where he is not known and dreams only of a job, a wife and a family. He succeeds partially in fulfilling these dreams, but then runs into a conflict on a construction job between the corrupt boss and fellow workers secretly planning a strike. He becomes a pawn in one camp while remaining true to his ideals in the other. Filmed in 1976 and shelved for five years.

The story of catholic saint Maximilian Kolbe (1894-1941), who volunteered to die in place of a stranger in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz.

The film is set toward the beginning of World War II, at a psychiatric hospital in the country. But this is an unusual hospital: there are several incurable schizophrenic cases, staff is bit strange and a writer has voluntarily entered the clinic because he is "peculiar" and a drug addict. Then, the occupying forces arrive...

Lavish romantic melodrama, obsessively concerned with sex. Maryska's husband is off to war. He soon is reported missing, and she does not protest much when is seduced by the husband's friend, a seedy professor with sickly wife and other mistresses on the side. However, the love of Maryska's life turns out to be a shy 17-year old, son of friends with whom she goes to stay.

Bogdan, an internationally acclaimed concert pianist, retires from the stage when his wife Iza dies, and he seeks solace on his mother's little farm. The little village on the Baltic coast is where he and his wife had sworn to love each other for all eternity when they were still children. Now that everything has changed, Bogdan succumbs to fate and begins to drink heavily. Thankfully his resolute mother has a formula to free the despairing Bogdan from his state of lethargy: renovating the run-down farmhouse and hard work in the stables. One day Bogdan makes a fateful discovery. A surprisingly musical cow, of all things, rekindles Bogdan's life spirits and gives him a crazy idea. His friends and family throw their hands up in horror, and when he tops things by organizing a village feast, things run completely out of control.

Nights and Days is a family saga of Barbara Ostrzenska-Niechcic, (played by Jadwiga Baranska) and Bogumil Niechcic, (played by Jerzy Binczycki) against the backdrop of the January Uprising of 1863 and World War I. The film is a rather straightforward and faithful adaptation of a novel by Maria Dabrowska with the same title. The plot is woven around the changing fortunes of a noble (upper-class) Niechcic family in the pre-WWI Poland. There are two main crossing threads: a social history one and an existential one. The cinematographic version is a condensation of the 12 part award winning TV serial of the same title and using the same cast and producers.