The Cinematheque

“Blind Chance is really one of Kieślowski’s best films, perhaps even the best and the most original.”

Agnieszka Holland

Chance and fate loom large in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s metaphysical cinema. In Blind Chance, a young medical student named Witek (Boguslaw Linda) rushes to catch a train and, in the film’s innovative Sliding Doors-devising narrative, faces three possible destinies. One, he catches the train, meets a principled Communist, and becomes a Party activist himself. Two, he bumps into a policeman, gets arrested, and winds up a dedicated anti-Communist dissident. Three, he misses the train, gets married, and settles down to a happy and avowedly apolitical life. (As Time Out​’s Adrian Turner notes, ​“A fourth story, in which Poland throws out the Communist Party, was presumably unthinkable” at the time.) Witek’s possible futures were obviously meant to represent Poland’s, a notion formalized by the camera’s collapsing of subjective and objective points of view. Blind Chance was completed in 1981, the year martial law was imposed. Shelved by the authorities, it was not released until 1987.

In Polish with English subtitles

“The director’s first work of metaphysical genius … Undoubtedly the work that birthed future thematic concerns, working practices, and an interest in meta-textual stories and large-scale projects that interconnect and intersect.”

Jason Wood, MUBI Notebook