Without Love

In 1980, at the age of 44 and twenty-two years after graduating from film school, Barbara Sass made her feature debut with Without Love.

Marianna Skoczek (Małgorzata Zajączkowska), a young woman living in a workers’ hostel, desperately pleads for love while the man responsible for her pregnancy shoves and beats her. Nearby, the young journalist Ewa Bracka (Dorota Stalińska) keeps taking photograph after photograph. The humiliated woman, and the images captured of her, will later shape not only Ewa’s career but her entire life.

Most descriptions of the film – including AI-generated ones – tell us that it is “a portrait of a woman so consumed by ambition that she gives up feeling for the sake of her career” (sic!). 

Today, however, another line from the film rings out far more forcefully: “When he found out I was pregnant, he threw me out”. This is the true foundation of the story, both for Ewa, the ruthless journalist, and for Marianna, the ordinary young woman just beginning her adult life. What, after all, separates the editor of a respected Italian newspaper from the drunken brute in the workers’ hostel? Both cast off their partners the moment they learn they are pregnant. Do Ewa and Marianna have the right to fight for themselves? Dorota Stalińska’s Ewa fights like a gun with the safety off. Without Love brought Barbara Sass the award for Best Directorial Debut at the Polish Film Festival, as well as the FIPRESCI Prize at the Mannheim International Film Festival.

Dorota Roszkowska, Barbara Młynarz-Pomorska

Barbara Sass (1936–2015) – Polish film director and screenwriter. She initially studied acting at the Łódź Film School (PWSFTviT), but eventually graduated from its Directing Department. Early in her career she worked as an assistant to prominent filmmakers, including Wojciech Jerzy Has. After directing several short television films, she made her feature debut with Without Love (1980), which won the Best Debut award at the Polish Film Festival in Gdańsk and the FIPRESCI Prize at the Mannheim Film Festival. With the exception of Caged (1987), all of her films are portraits of women. Set against different historical backdrops, they form a distinctive and universal voice within women’s cinema, still relatively underrepresented in Poland. Her regular cinematographer was her husband, Wiesław Zdort.

11th New Horizons IFF Catalogue

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