I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Awesome Movie

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Can't quite understand how this film got overlooked for an Oscar. It got a rave review in a Danish newspaper when it was doing the rounds here in March 2015, so my wife and I went to see it. Just beautifully filmed and acted - a very moving portrait of a people whom I knew nothing about previously. When I came out, I was on the verge of revising my choice of Fanny and Alexander as my favourite film; I was so in awe of what I had just seen. Sadly, Krzysztof Krauze, the co-director, died at Christmas 2014. I have been in touch with the Polish Film Institute to see if a DVD with English sub-titles is available, but it isn't yet, despite it being shown at the London Film Festival. Let's hope something is done about that - I'd buy several copies as gifts for friends. If you get a chance to see it, don't miss it. "Ida" deservedly got a lot of good reviews and even the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. This one is much better.

Beautiful music, poetry and excellence in black and white photography. All in one motion picture telling the story of "Papuszka". A true biographical movie that puts us as close as just besides her, allowing us and giving enough time to understand. The movie tells her journey. Emotional, both tragic and beautiful moments, all did affect me very much. After watching the movie those are still in my heart like a drug, a mix of compassion, beauty and logic affecting my brain. I hope the music will or already is released separately as I became addicted to it when the movie ended and the music stopped... I just want more!Historically, it reminds us that not only Jews were victims of holocaust, which can be easily forgotten with amount of films focusing on Jew victims. There were many other ethnic groups, but since this movie mostly focuses on telling her life not the holocaust itself, we only get a glimpse on Gypsy's holocaust.Must see for any movie lover. I give it 10 out of 10, because in my opinion this is a masterpiece that is a fine addition in the history of Polish cinema (I hope not only Polish).

Shot beautifully in b/w and part-funded by the Polish Film Institute, this is an outstanding production. Particularly strong backdrops are conveyed through the camping scenes, the travelling way of life with multiple horse drawn waggons, and their minstrelling engagements, (see the brilliant scene in the jail), all powered by a vibrant soundtrack. The film attests to the struggle that this way of life entails for each generation of the Polish Roma people, as well as the strongly inter-dependent nature of these communities, pushed to societies margins.It makes even the most benevolent non Roma become a cursed outsider, ( an excellent Antoni Pawlicki). Chronology switches back and forth through fifty years, mostly to reveal how and why Papusza acquired her poetic talents, but the film never loses its sense of authenticity or fails to convey the deep sense of degradation that the Roma community are made to feel by all levels of the State, and by the established community around them. This is not however a political film at all. In my view, it is much more a romantic tragedy of lost rights, lost affection, and alienation of non-conformists by society, whilst all the time pointing out that the real loser remains the community itself, and the significance of this loss to the European social anatomy. The outsider Jerzy Fikowski was the first professional writer to characterize Roma customs and their way of life in words. The tragedy he creates is the distrust that he sows from the moment he enters the story, himself a fugitive, in the campsite where the film begins. The film was five years in preparation much of it filmed in the wilds of Eastern Poland, not so very far from where Hitler built his most elaborate hiding grounds, in the final months of the Third Reich. This film must surely be the most-polished jewel of 2103's London Film Festival but there is little to indicate that the organizers see this for the treasure it surely is.