Emi Buchwald

For her feature debut There Are No Ghosts in the Apartment on Dobra Street, she received the Best Director Award at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia, as well as Polityka’s Passport Award. Earlier, she had already garnered numerous accolades for her graduation film Heimat and the short Beautiful Meadow in Bloom.

“One could call her the breakout discovery of the 50th Polish Film Festival in Gdynia, where she took home the Best Director Award, the Andrzej Żuławski Golden Claw, and the Journalists’ Award. But anyone who has been paying close attention to Emi Buchwald’s earlier short-form work — both documentary and narrative — including films produced within the Polish Filmmakers Association’s Munk Studio, will hardly be surprised by the success of her feature debut,” wrote Ola Salwa in Magazyn Filmowy.

Emi Buchwald first completed the documentary program at the Wajda School before going on to study directing at the Łódź Film School. “At the Wajda School, we worked with a young faculty — the Paladino group: Piotr Stasik, Maciej Cuske, Marcin Sauter and Thierry Paladino. That’s where I made my six-minute documentary Brothers. After the screening, Andrzej Wajda asked me when the second part would be made. If he were still alive, I would tell him: ‘Mr. Andrzej, I made the second part — it’s called There Are No Ghosts in the Apartment on Dobra Street,’” the director recalled in an interview with Ola Salwa for Magazyn Filmowy. “At the Wajda School, I received a strong foundation in documentary filmmaking. The guys were very attentive to form — their films were always formally refined — and they cared deeply about tenderness toward their subjects. That helped me enormously. They also gave me technical grounding — how to operate a camera, record sound, and so on, because we did everything ourselves. And they helped me in another way. I was, and still am, extremely shy. I thought I would never become a director, because whenever I had to speak in public, I would turn completely red. The Paladino group saw that, so they would often call on me — but in a good atmosphere, in safe conditions. That made it at least a little easier for me later at the Łódź Film School.”

Born in 1991, Buchwald was already being hailed as a rising star of Polish cinema while still a student. Her school films — including the short fiction Driving Lessons, which examined the relationship between three sisters — won the Grand Prix at the Warsaw-based Dozwolone do 21 festival. Five years later, her documentary Learning collected numerous awards and traveled widely on the international festival circuit.

“In a film under twenty minutes, Buchwald portrays children in a Polish-language class learning Julian Tuwim’s poem Learning. From seemingly innocent observations, the director crafts a story about the absurdity of the system and the school as a space that shapes — often problematically — young minds. In depicting the unequal struggle of children and their parents with the poem’s text, she blends documentary comedy with sociological commentary.

In her student films, humor was paired with tenderness, while defiance went hand in hand with creative courage,” wrote Culture.pl.

“In Learning, we didn’t know whether we would meet interesting people, how the conversations between parents and children would turn out. The idea was to show children learning a poem by heart at school and at home. I wanted to tell the story through form — static yet bold framing in the school, and a camera circling the characters at home. Jacek Bławut encouraged me to be as bold as possible. When I wanted to set up two cameras at school, he said: use four,” Buchwald said.

Her graduation film Heimat (2017) won awards at festivals in Kraków, Lisbon, Poznań and Koszalin, as well as the Jan Machulski Award for Best Film.

In Heimat, Buchwald follows a family of five gathered at a police station. The adult children must testify against a man who assaulted their father. The incident itself quickly recedes into the background, as the focus shifts to the gradually revealed family dynamics — marked by fractures, entanglements and ambiguity.

“The plot was pretextual and stemmed from my family’s experiences. I knew I wasn’t interested in a story as such, but in a state and a language of storytelling. I wanted to capture a sense of suspension — adult children who, despite moving out, still mentally inhabit the family home, still have their room there,” Buchwald said in conversation with Ola Salwa. “The parents, in turn, cannot find themselves together in an empty house. They have to rebuild that space and their relationship. I was interested in that specific moment — and in how they communicate, what defines this family, what dependencies exist between them — not in solving a crime.”

At the Koszalin festival, journalists awarded Buchwald for her “brilliant use of everyday absurdity to create a portrait of a family in all its acrobatic complexity, with tenderness and freshness toward its flaws. And for the empty space left by the couch and childhood in the family home.” “Her film is a sad comedy of absurdities and, at the same time, a work filled with tenderness. Those in Polish cinema attuned to a similar tone should follow this young director’s career closely,” wrote Bartosz Staszczyszyn after the premiere of Heimat. “Here, the filmmaker returned to her favored motif — a family whose internal fractures are exposed by dramatic events.”

Produced within the Munk Studio’s “30 Minutes” program, Beautiful Meadow in Bloom (2022) tells the story of a landscape architect engaged in an unequal struggle with a world indifferent to the beauty of nature. Driven by his neurotic personality, he spirals into a chain of absurd events, all the while trying to remain a good father.

“Intensity was the key word guiding us at every stage of the film. It was meant to permeate language, sound and image. Beautiful Meadow in Bloom is about a man whose world of imagination and beautiful ideas collides with the pace and overstimulation of the outside world. We move through a brutal yet often humorous everyday reality devoid of high stakes. The hypersensitive landscape architect became my protagonist because of his ambiguity. His presence in reality and his decisions are controversial and fuel a loop of chaos. And yet nature remains with him — Emil tries to make this chaotic world more beautiful. That’s what I like most about him,” Buchwald said, noting that the film, shot on 16mm, is also a tribute to the morally complex characters of 1970s American cinema and to contemporary filmmakers she admires, including the Safdie brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson and Noah Baumbach.

Beautiful Meadow in Bloom received 12 festival awards, including at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia (short film competition), the Warsaw Film Festival and in Łagów, where jurors praised the film as “a beautifully told family drama, with particular recognition for Andrzej Kłak’s performance, which conveys with remarkable truth, subtlety and emotional force a man’s determination to remain present in his daughter’s life and to preserve his dignity.” The film is available on Canal+.

In 2023, Buchwald premiered the documentary Echo, portraying two teenagers struggling with stuttering as they attempt to confront their inner demons. The film received distinctions at, among others, the Warsaw Film Festival and FebioFest in Bratislava.

In her 2025 feature debut There Are No Ghosts in the Apartment on Dobra Street, Buchwald once again collaborated with Munk Studio. “Every now and then, a film comes along in which people matter more than the story being told — as if it were made also, or perhaps above all, to help them understand and process certain things. That is precisely the kind of film There Are No Ghosts in the Apartment on Dobra Street is,” wrote a Gazeta Wyborcza critic following the festival premiere.

In There Are No Ghosts…, Buchwald tells the story of four adult siblings grappling with their everyday struggles while confronting questions of love and independence. The film offers a portrait of Generation Z, a cohort previously largely absent from Polish cinema. Buchwald approaches their dilemmas with seriousness but without pathos. The four protagonists are: the eldest, Jana (Karolina Rzepa), who seems to assume a maternal role; the twins, Franek and Nastka (Izabella Dudziak and Tymoteusz Rożynek), bound since birth by an invisible thread; and Benek (Bartłomiej Deklewa), the youngest, seemingly the most lost. He drifts with a backpack between his siblings, unable to find his place. Franek has thrown him out of the family home — the titular apartment on Dobra Street. Benek, in any case, could not sleep there, convinced it was haunted.

“Ever since I became interested in cinema, I’ve been drawn to gently bending reality — not in a hardcore way, but subtly,” Buchwald said in Magazyn Filmowy. “David Lynch, in making his most realistic film The Straight Story, chose a starting point that is quite surreal. The Dusiołek at the beginning and end of my film, in some way, relates to Post Tenebras Lux by Carlos Reygadas, where a devil with a briefcase appears. It’s not entirely my cinema, but I value it for the combination of realism and metaphysics. Think of Alice Rohrwacher — she also estranges reality through locality. Today it sounds like a cliché, but she truly is important. We have our own local grounding. I — beyond these stories — also have my own: the mythology of the family home. And I think that’s something worth drawing from above all.”

“The narrative strength of There Are No Ghosts… lies in the gradual process by which the viewer becomes acquainted with its characters: an empathetic movement closer and closer, attentiveness to moments of crisis, fractures, and always meaningful words that attempt to capture them,” reads Filmweb. “By structuring the film not around plot but around characters who seem to take us by the hand, Buchwald achieves something rare in Polish cinema — a sense of genuine intimacy with the people on screen. In the apartment on Dobra Street, we are guests who, out of respect, want to take off our shoes in the hallway, listen closely to the rapid current of sibling matters, and gradually grow attached to their lives, simply being alongside them.”

“I know who the people I place at the center are — what they want or don’t want, where they are in life, what they are facing — and I follow them, not the plot,” Buchwald said of her method. “I listen to my characters almost as I would in documentary, which is where I started — my first short, Brothers, was also not built on plot but on experience. That’s how I construct a screenplay. Because I know the characters well, I’m also very attached to my dialogue; I don’t really embrace improvising or having actors reinvent it. The way the characters communicate also shapes the balance between drama and comedy, the film’s atmosphere.”

“Finally, in Polish cinema, dialogue no longer rustles like paper — it sounds natural, like real conversations. These are conversations seemingly about nothing, yet about everything,” wrote Gazeta Wyborcza. “Together with co-writer Karol Marczak, Buchwald captures both the tragedy and the absurdity of our times.”

There Are No Ghosts in the Apartment on Dobra Street opens on March 13. Buchwald is already at work on her next project.

“I’d like to move further away from strict realism and allow more metaphysics into the world of the film, to continue these explorations — but without repeating what we did in There Are No Ghosts…. In Beautiful Meadow in Bloom, we had the vision of the meadow — something unreal the protagonist follows. In Heimat, it was an estranged image of the home; in There Are No Ghosts in the Apartment on Dobra Street, it’s the Dusiołek, which appears physically, while the characters connect through intuition,” the director said. “In my next film, I want to draw on our family stories connected with ghosts.”