Back Then

Poland in the eighties. Marta is a romantic who is getting nowhere at school, sharing a room with her sister Kasia and their grandmother, who tells the girls stories of the uprising instead of fairy tales. In the room on the other side of the wall are the parents: Tadek, an educated man the state keeps humiliating, who distils his own spirits after work and quietly envies his prosperous brother in law, and Elżbieta, who heads the Solidarity union at her workplace and dreams of getting out of Poland. When an orange Fiat 126 arrives, the family's real adventure starts. Kinga Dębska wrote it out of her own childhood, keeping the nostalgia without softening how narrow the period was.