Zhenia has just arrived in Poland from Ukraine. He does not speak Polish and has just been issued his residency permit at the immigration office to the accompaniment of a Shostakovich waltz. He starts working in a gated community of symmetrical and identical houses on the outskirts of the city, and their wealthy middle-class inhabitants flock to sign up for his services. “Trust me, I will free you from pain”, he promises his clients, unaware that his abilities will change their lives. Behind the comfortable facades the inhabitants put up, there lies melancholic sadness, fatal diagnoses, drugs, loneliness and a longing for understanding. Zhenia, a messiah with a difficult past, heals the neighbourhood with promises of deliverance and snow.

The character of Zhenia is a mysterious vagrant – there is no single way to decipher him, the directors say of the character, portrayed by the popular Russian-born British actor Alec Utgoff. The neighbourhood with its cookie-cutter houses has already been likened to Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) in the press. This suburban purgatory drama by a duo of the most prominent Polish auteur filmmakers of the moment, director Małgorzata Szumowska and cinematographer Michał Englert, fuses fairy tale with Eastern European migration, a satire of class prejudice with a love for humanity, aspects of contemporary Polish identity with the transience of the past. This poetic story about the angel from Chernobyl premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival and later became Poland’s contender for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars.