What Belongs to Others is the first signal of a major new master emerging in Polish cinema, and one of the sharpest and most striking films to discover this year. Kasia is bound to a dangerous relationship with a violent man, forced by him to make her living through theft. One day, sneaking into the apartment of a tenant who has died, she seizes a chance to change her life by posing as his lover. And in mourning a man she never once met, she at last begins to confront the feelings she had long kept locked away. Having honed his cinematic sensibility as an assistant director for the master Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida (2013), director Grzegorz Dębowski, in this captivating social thriller What Belongs to Others, paints a portrait — restrained yet aching — of a pale Warsaw inhabited by lonely souls.
Born on January 6, 1987. A graduate of the Directing program at the Łódź Film School, he gained on-set experience as an assistant director to Paweł Pawlikowski, Leszek Dawid, Martha Coolidge, and Gary Romolo Fiorelli, among others. Following the short film Endurance (2015), his debut feature Next to Nothing (2023) won the Best Director Debut and Best Screenplay awards at the Gdynia Film Festival and the Polish Film Award for Discovery of the Year. In 2022, he hitchhiked to Ukraine with chef José Andrés (World Central Kitchen), helping launch one of the largest humanitarian aid operations in history. His second feature, What Belongs to Others, was produced in Poland and was selected for the Orizzonti section of the 2026 Venice Film Festival.
From Busan International Film Festival 2026, No. 31
