Housing association, please do not evict the plot! About Empty Pockets

Festival Newspaper Published on 25.09.2026

"Czarna godzina", reż. Filip Bojarski

Weronika Zarzecka

Instead of a biblical Garden of Eden where everything starts with a fig leaf and the original sin, in Empty Pockets we have Ada and Ewa - two teachers in love

trying to survive in the world, where monthly rent plays the role of forbidden fruit and ruthlessness of the Polish housing situation is the snake. Here, a biblical myth about the expulsion from the Garden of Eden changes into a prosaic eviction from a tight shoebox, where instead of a garden we get a view of a local skip and instead of an Angel with a flaming sword - a gloomy man with a relocation request.

The housing crisis was to be a starting point for something bigger - the matter of a professional burnout, chronic fatigue, especially this intense feeling that as an average human, nothing depends on you. It was to be, because it actually remains a point, at which everything starts, and regrettably largely ends. Instead of a catalyst, we get an excuse - a subject opening doors to successive scenes but no one and nothing goes through their threshold. The plot, instead of growing from this soil, circles around it like a broken record as if it was scared to go past the door mat.

We swirl around a mundane search for a new flat - casting for a tenant similar to a job interview from hell, race against the clock to pay deposit and rent, rough and tumble with frauds of the property market, and ultimately, an attempt to call your home address and come to terms with a vision of returning back to where it all begun.

Bojarski intertwines a linear narrative with thorns of ironical gags - almost every sequence echoes with a joke and then flickers out with another Ada and Ewa’s failure. This repetitiveness saves fair part of screen humour.

At the same time, I really wish I liked this film better.

Because it tells a story of something. At least it tries to, although it rather stammers. Perhaps however, the intention was to just mention the topic but a sketch-comedy episodicity of this story was only up to a grotesque build-up of the plot, rather than its dramatic foundation? And the whole processing force of this project got stuck in an asymmetrical equation? Had a good laugh? An easy and a hearty one. Anything else? Not necessarily.

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The original sin of Empty Pockets is its structural helplessness. Instead of a cohesive narration leading anywhere, we get a collection of promising scenes, which sadly don’t have an opportunity to form a whole, even though a shadow of a potential, which can easily charm the audience, is following them. The rescue comes with debuting actresses playing main roles. Helka Rząsa and Julia Piklikiewicz carry on their shoulders distinguished and interesting characters who form a nice couple on screen. The subtlety of their relationship is refreshing.

Ada and Ewa’s love is neither baggage nor a placard. They don’t excuse themselves to any aching aunt from a province because they have more important things on their minds, like where are they going to sleep next month. Although it may sound like something obvious, that the fact of being queer - from the perspective of Polish cinema overview - can be just a background of the story and not its resounding epicentre, is gratifying.

With a painful precision, the film touches on the modern paradox, which in the past has been the foundation of public confidence but today is more of an unfunny joke - the status of the teaching career. Another important matter, and sadly another just brushed from a distance as if it was stinging, as if the script was afraid of sitting beside it for more than a page or two.

Here comes the biggest question mark of this showing. I got the impression that filmmakers got too fascinated with the form and using it tried to add all things missing from the script. Instead of fully empathising with the characters’ claustrophobia and sinking alongside them in this grey, stuffy stalemate, very beautiful frames, like really beautiful, became too perfect with time. Instead of building a flowing narration and adding dynamics, which was missing in dialogues, these self-made experiments created an unnecessary distance between a viewer and the screen. It works like a thick layer of frosting, which you would love to bite, but there would be a slack-baked cake underneath. The form ate the content. It wanted to pump her up but fell into a trap of excess, where it eventually tripped and fell on the last nail to its own coffin.
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Empty Pockets looks interesting amongst its class. For many years in Gdynia, young directors armed with cameras and generational trauma, have tried to tell a story about an inability to settle down in a country that promised them stabilisation but gave them fixed-term contracts and Facebook groups with notices “Only for couples without children, pets and dreams” instead. Bojarski falls into this category capably, maybe even too capably - with a craft confidence of someone, who knows what is trendy in art-house cinema to the extent of making a “good debut”. On screen however, one can feel that this topic hasn’t properly rested, mellowed to this phase, where observation turns into something more than an accurate depiction, this weight of stronger force than effectiveness. It’s a difference between a film which presents itself as a voice of a generation and a film which is really it. Empty Pockets lands dangerously often on the first side of the equation.

The emptiness of the message breaks through this clean and neat comedy, growing out from somewhere between the perches of absurd and situational impasse. This cannot be denied this film because there’s something nervous, defensive in this laugh, something scratching and screeching - and only then this story strikes a chord with a viewer in some way, breaking the distance, which has implemented chaos in the plot.

Bojarski has an ear readjusted to this everyday Polish babble, has two actresses which would be capable of carrying even heavier script on their shoulders, has even a topic about which domestic cinema is steadfastly silent. He only lacks the courage to fight for his characters’ flat being taken from them and their dignity piece by piece till the end, instead of gracefully summing up the case with a tiny (or even no) punch line and a cut to a black screen.

Empty Pockets remains what it is in the majority of our first one-room flat, rented for a short time - you live in it, even come to like it with time but no one gives it more thought than necessary.