The film that first brought international attention to the work of director Krzysztof Kieslowski, Camera Buff is a self-reflexive movie about the possibilities and limitations of filmmaking and a fable about Polish life under communist rule. The central character, Filip (Jerzy Stuhr), is a factory worker who purchases a movie camera to record the birth of his daughter and goes on to win an amateur competition with a film about his workplace. Filip’s somewhat naïve enthusiasm for filming leads to the break-up of his marriage and his movies soon begin to attract political criticism because of their candour.

In part reflecting Kieslowski’s own position as a former documentary filmmaker, Camera Buff also looks forward to his later fictions as it engages with a whole series of philosophical, moral and political issues with which the artist has to grapple. Kieslowski described it as ‘an attempt to consider what is right, objective reality or the character who works against that reality.’