Decalogue I

A computer scientist living on a Warsaw housing estate teaches his son to calculate everything. Together they work out the thickness of the ice on the lake, and the result comes back safe. The boy goes skating. Krzysztof Kieślowski directed and wrote it with Krzysztof Piesiewicz. Zbigniew Preisner composed the music. The idea came from Piesiewicz: to make a modern equivalent of a fifteenth-century work depicting the Ten Commandments. This is the first film of the ten-part Dekalog. The parts do not map one to one onto the commandments; Kieślowski himself said they did not correspond exactly. All ten take place on the same estate in 1980s Warsaw, independent of each other and touching at the edges. The series has one recurring device: a nameless man played by Artur Barciś, present in nine of the ten films, saying nothing and intervening in nothing. Stanley Kubrick wrote a foreword to the published screenplays in 1991 and called it the only film masterpiece he could think of. Metacritic sits at 100, and it won the 1991 BAFTA TV Award for Best International Programme. The Vatican placed it among fifteen films in its Values category. Who it is for: viewers who like spare, hard films built on a moral question. Who it is not for: anyone looking for consolation. This part is about the death of a child and Kieślowski softens nothing.