The Museum is open 11:00 – 19:00
Cinema is closed now
The Museum is open 11:00 – 19:00
Cinema is closed now
Unassuming Men: An Evening of Short Films by Michał Toczek
Movies and a meeting
Join us for a screening of Michał Toczek’s short films. We’ll be showing three titles, including Spiritus Sanctus (2026), making its cinematic debut in Poland straight from the Cannes Film Festival
Following the screening of Dead Marriage (2022), To Be Someone (2023), and Spiritus Sanctus (2026), there will be a discussion with director Michał Toczek and actor Sebastian Stankiewicz, moderated by Michał Oleszczyk.
The international success of the film Spiritus sanctus, which was selected for the Short Film Competition at the 79th Cannes International Film Festival, confirmed what many observers of the Polish film scene had known for a long time: that recent graduate of the Łódź Film School Michał Toczek (b. 1996) is one of the greatest talents of young Polish cinema.
The three short films Toczek shot with actor Sebastian Stankiewicz—two school etudes: Dead Marriage (2022) and To Be Someone (2023), as well as Spiritus sanctus (2026), produced at the Munk Studio—form a subtle, humorous trilogy about unassuming people who slip by on the sidelines, living in the corners and dusty backrooms of reality.
In Michał Toczek’s cinema, the mainstream of the world flows majestically, but it flows in the background. Someone is shooting a grand historical blockbuster. Someone jumps over a fence and helps topple communism. Someone else serves as the successor to Saint Peter. Meanwhile, Michał Toczek invites us to meet characters who find themselves on the absolute margins of these events—yet inadvertently touch upon their very essence.
In Dead Marriage, we meet a film extra who brilliantly plays a corpse in battle scenes. In Be Somebody, a modest electrician begins earning money from historical reenactments, in which he plays Lech Wałęsa to the delight of tourists—and to his own frustration.
Finally, in Spiritus sanctus, the simple necessity of buying a bottle becomes an opportunity for an ordinary drinker to encounter not only John Paul II himself (during his pilgrimage to Poland in 1999) but also metaphysics as such.
Sebastian Stankiewicz plays all these characters in Toczek’s film, creating outstanding portraits of three men revealing surprising fragility and depth. One could say that Michał Toczek has found his muse in Stankiewicz, and the directorial precision of all the films presented this evening whets our appetite for further installments of this body of work—one that rehabilitates Polish masculinity with both humor and depth.
[Michał Oleszczyk]