Family Life

Wit, a young industrial designer, returns reluctantly to the family house to care for his gravely ill father. Entering the dark rooms of a house he has not visited in six years, he finds himself once again exposed to the peculiar sicknesses of his father, his sister and his aunt. The film shows the family not as a refuge but as an order that pulls a person back into his former self. The account blames nobody alone; it gives the house and those in it together, as the remains of a class in collapse. The tension between Wit’s wish to leave and his obligation to stay never lets up. The house, the garden and an old factory are the whole of the film’s setting. Daniel Olbrychski plays the lead in Krzysztof Zanussi’s eighty eight minute Polish film, completed in 1971.