Corpus Christi

Jan Komasa's Corpus Christi (Boże Ciało) was nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 2020, the first Polish film to receive a nomination in the category since Paweł Pawlikowski's Cold War two years earlier. The film won the Edipo Re Award at Venice 2019 and a host of national-Polish awards. Komasa, a Polish theatre and film director already established in his domestic context, made the film with screenwriter Mateusz Pacewicz from a script that combined elements of multiple actual cases of imposture.

Daniel (Bartosz Bielenia, in a remarkable lead performance), a twenty-year-old recently released from a youth-detention centre in a Polish town, has experienced a religious awakening during his sentence and wants to enter the priesthood. The institution will not consider him because of his criminal record. Sent to a sawmill job in a small Polish village as part of his rehabilitation, he is mistaken on arrival for a visiting priest, and, on a partial impulse and partial moral instinct, he accepts the role. The film follows his quietly extraordinary impact on the village's grief over a recent road-traffic tragedy, and the slow accumulation of consequences from his choice.

Bielenia's performance (luminous, uncomfortable, thoroughly inhabited) has been compared to the great central performances of post-war Polish cinema (Krystyna Janda in Man of Marble, Jerzy Stuhr in Camera Buff). The film operates as moral parable, character study, and quiet investigation of what religious authority is for. The closing scenes are among the most carefully built endings in recent Polish cinema.