33 Scenes from Life

Julia has everything one could dream of: a great and warm home, a loving husband, good parents and a successful career as an artist-photographer. But all of a sudden her world collapses when her mother becomes sick with cancer. In the following months she struggles with her mother's illness, the continuity of her career and the absence of her husband, who is also successful. The sickness and death of Julia's mother are very different and more absurd from a close perspective than one would expect. As if all of this weren't hard enough, her father can't deal with his wife's death and drowns himself in alcohol. Julia looks for comfort in the arms of an unexpected person...
A valuable film with high artistic quality, this is about the ridiculous turns that life can unexpectedly take, about loosing the people dearest to you and becoming a part of the adult world. Malgoska Szumowska has excelled in presenting not a tear-jerking drama but a true mirror of the vulnerability of life. Human, intensive, realistic. Tragic and sometimes funny, with a lot of cigarettes and booze. A film that will stay with you forever and make a place for itself in international film history. (LC)