The 2023 Seattle International Film Festival is at our doors. This year, SIFF will show two Polish films, “Pianoforte” and “Filip” and also an American movie “Late Bloomers” with a Polish immigrant as a main character.

From SIFF alum and Audience Award winner Lisa Steen comes this dark comedy about a depressed Brooklyn slacker (Karen Gillan, “Dual”) who breaks her hip and goes into physical therapy, where she begins an unlikely friendship with an 86-year-old Polish immigrant.

Somewhere betwixt the ageless act of cantankerous rebellion and the crushing reality of aging lies this naturalistic, feature-length debut from Lisa Steen (a previous SIFF Audience Award winner for her short film “Stepdaddy”). Louise (Karen Gillan) is a struggling musician forced into reassessing the trajectory of her life after obstinate impulsivity leaves her nursing a broken heart and broken hip and checked into a hospital ward shared with Antonina (Margaret Sophie Stein), a surly Polish woman 54 years her senior. Louise finds it hard to escape Antonina, who begins to pop up in her life almost cosmically. As their orbits spin closer together, perspectives shift, fusing them in an unlikely camaraderie. Soon, the pair must rely on each other to adjust to the simultaneously humorous and begrudgingly miserable nature of existence. To quote the Polish author Hanna Krall from the book “What Happened to Our Fairy-Tale,” “Nieodczuwany smutek, przed ktorym udało nam się uciec, i tak dopadnie nas poźniej…” loosely meaning that there is no way to run from our sadness; we have to experience all that we’re given. I’d like to add that joking about it also helps.

This movie is screened at SIFF Cinema Uptown on May 13 at 6 pm and at AMC Pacific Place 11 on May 14 at 4:15 pm.

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by RK