Agnes

During an innocent game of hide and seek, six year old Agnes experiences a family tragedy. Her mother takes advantage of the commotion and leaves the family. She opens and old wardrobe to take out a suitcase. Agnes assumes that this is a new hiding place for the game. Meanwhile, her mother discretely slips out of the apartment where another man is waiting for her. The father, while playing hide and seek blindfolded does not notice a thing. Surprised, lost and frightened, Agnes enters the open wardrobe. The wardrobe becomes her escape, hideout and refuge from the world which will insulate her from reality for a long time. Agnes’s father is a jazz musician. After his wife leaves, he is crushed and shuts himself away. Agnes and her father live beside each other in the same apartment. However, they are completely alone, in two separate worlds. Agnes makes the space in the wardrobe her own and furnishes it according to her needs. She occasionally observes her father from there, listens to his music. Years pass and Agnes grows. Despite being closed off in the wardrobe and the comfort she has created there, in time, the outside world begins to remind her of its existence. First by the death of her father. The girl misses the music, that little part of her father’s presence. She tries to substitute it with the sound of tapping on an typewriter, then with the radio. The silence of loneliness causes memories of childhood to return, happy times playing with neighborhood children. Seemingly useless items also found in the wardrobe elicit emotions and awaken instincts in her. The telephone no longer works but Agnes recalls her parents talking into the receiver. The radio she listens to informs her of  what is going on outside and transmits music which moves her to dance. Agnieszka is growing up, she changes and feels the need for change. Her mother’s dress stuffed into a corner reminds her that she is a woman. Looking at herself in the mirror on the inside of the wardrobe doors she feels that she wants to be pretty and to be loved. She continues to grow and her body almost merges with the wardrobe. Until the moment when it turns out that the wardrobe is too tight for her and her needs. As Agnes continues to grow and open up to the outside world, the apartment becomes more and more empty. Without the furniture which witnessed her tragedy long ago, the apartment is overgrown with grass and transforms into a part of a landscape in which only an old dilapidated wardrobe remains. Agnes leaves the wardrobe leaving her past behind. Parallel to the story of Agnes closed up in the wardrobe a subplot emerges in which she is a grown, 30 year old woman waiting to have her own baby and who returns to the playground of her childhood. This place is woven through with memories of happiness and those of a ruined childhood. Agnes takes a trip down memory lane from childhood to adulthood. Reality is tangled up with memories. This intricately woven trip in time and space causes Agnes to become mature and aware. She finds the lost child within herself and finally, she can accept herself and the world around her.