LEJDIS

Lucja, Korba, Gosia and Monia have been friends since childhood. Over the years, the four “lejdis” have gone through thick and thin together, and celebrate their bond by throwing a now traditional “New Year’s Party” at the height of summer. The permissive language and ways of these modern women would make their mothers and grandmothers blush (and perhaps feel a secret pang of envy). Yet, for all their bravado, none of the four is spared emotional ups and downs. Schoolteacher and single mother Lucja, for instance, is devastated when the man she reckoned would be an ideal new father to Szymek, her son, turns out to be a philanderer. Monia is married to a millionaire who sees himself as the last in the line of the Roman Empire, a legacy that obliges him to disappear into the surrounding forests at regular intervals in order to cross swords with the Gallic and Germanic foe and other barbarian invaders. Gosia, for her part, flies to Brussel on a monthly basis dictated by ovulation – she and her husband Artur are desperate to conceive the child they’ve wanted so long. Until she realises he longs for his Portugese male lover more than he does for her. Korba is the most “emancipated” of the four – permanently on the lookout for men to be erased from her slate the next morning...

Surpassed at the box office only by the historical films of past masters Jerzy Hoffman, Jerzy Kawalerowicz and Andrzej Wajda, LEJDIS attracted 2.5 million cinema-goers, making it the most popular Polish film of the past 20 years dealing with contemporary subject matter.