What Belongs to Others has won the Warsaw Grand Prix, the top international competition award at the 42nd Warsaw International Film Festival. The result brings attention to Grzegorz Dębowski’s Polish drama about a woman whose attempt to exploit a stranger’s death becomes entangled with the possibility of changing her own life. The Hollywood Reporter reported the win; [Cineuropa’s awards coverage](https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/496543) independently confirms the result.
The compelling question behind that premise is whether discovering a better version of yourself through deception makes the deception any less damaging. Kasia, the film’s central character, gives that question a particularly uncomfortable shape: she seeks a place in someone else’s life before she can imagine a different place in her own.
Premise spoilers follow. This is a character-focused interpretation of the film’s documented story and published dialogue, rather than a firsthand assessment of every scene or its ending.
Kasia’s deception starts with something concrete
The official Venice festival synopsis identifies Kasia, played by Monika Sabina Kwiatkowska, as a burglar who works with her boyfriend. During a break-in, she discovers a man who has died by suicide. After her boyfriend’s arrest, she returns to the apartment and claims to have been the dead man’s partner. Initially, she wants access to his money and belongings. These plot details and the principal credits appear in [Venice’s official film entry](https://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2026/orizzonti/cudze-rzeczy-what-belongs-others).
That material motive matters. It prevents a sympathetic reading from turning Kasia immediately into a misunderstood romantic. She is making a claim on things and relationships that are not hers. Any interpretation of her growing emotional involvement has to keep that original calculation in view.
From her perspective, the invented relationship offers something burglary alone cannot: a reason to remain. A thief usually needs to leave before anyone notices. Someone believed to be a partner can explain her presence. The change is therefore social as well as practical. Kasia moves from entering a private space without permission to seeking recognition within it.
My reading is that this makes belonging more consequential than possession. An object can be taken without accepting any responsibility for its previous owner. A relationship, even an invented one, brings questions, expectations, and other people into the transaction.
The boyfriend and the limits of survival
Amber Wilkinson’s published review describes Kasia’s boyfriend, Darek, as emotionally abusive and identifies unpaid rent as another pressure on her life. It also quotes a neighbor saying, “I have no interest in other people’s lives.” That short line establishes a useful point of entry into the film’s social world. See [Eye for Film’s review](https://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/review/what-belongs-to-others-2026-film-review-by-amber-wilkinson).
Indifference can protect privacy, but it can also leave distress unacknowledged. For someone in Kasia’s position, the difference is enormous. Being left alone might mean freedom from scrutiny; it might equally mean having nobody willing to notice that something is wrong.
Her circumstances offer reasons to understand her behavior without automatically excusing it. Economic insecurity and a damaging relationship can narrow a person’s sense of available choices. They do not erase the interests of the people affected by those choices. Holding both ideas together produces a more useful character analysis than deciding whether Kasia deserves a simple label of victim or opportunist.
For viewers, the important question becomes how her priorities change. Does another person’s vulnerability remain useful to her, or does she begin to recognize an obligation toward it? That distinction is more revealing than whether she becomes easier to like.
A dead stranger becomes more than an opportunity
The documented story follows Kasia’s increasing interest in the man whose life she has entered. Her involvement extends beyond his possessions to his history and the people who knew him. Dębowski describes the central investigation as a search into a life, rather than a conventional search for a criminal.
This reverses the usual appeal of a burglary premise. At first, another person’s home can be understood as a collection of useful things. Learning about its owner complicates that view. What looked available acquires a history; what appeared abandoned may still matter intensely to somebody else.
The illustration above is symbolic, not a reconstruction of a film scene. Its ordinary objects point toward the distinction at the heart of this reading: access to someone’s possessions does not provide complete access to the person.
There is also an ethical danger in treating the dead man solely as the means of Kasia’s renewal. His life cannot become meaningful only because it changes hers. A careful interpretation should preserve his separateness—the experiences she cannot recover, the intentions she cannot establish, and the relationships she cannot simply inherit.
Can genuine feeling grow from a false relationship?
That is the film’s richest interpretive problem. A feeling can be sincere even when the circumstances that produced it are dishonest. Sincerity, however, does not retroactively create consent. Kasia’s emotional investment and the other characters’ right to know the truth remain separate concerns.
For the people connected to the dead man, her presence potentially changes their understanding of someone they have lost. From their perspective, the issue is not merely whether she means well now. It is whether they are responding to a person or to a story constructed for them.
This makes compassion a demanding response. Understanding Kasia requires attention to her vulnerability; respecting the others requires attention to their vulnerability, too. Our discussion of acceptance and exclusion in Cats approaches belonging through a different kind of outsider. Here, acceptance carries the additional complication of an invented claim.
What Warsaw’s recognition invites viewers to examine
The award gives the film a clear point of discovery. It does not settle the moral questions its premise raises, or replace an individual viewer’s judgment. Festival recognition is most useful when it encourages attention to a particular work rather than supplying a ready-made response.
That principle also informs our examination of how festival attention can bring filmmakers into focus. The next step is to ask specific questions about character and consequence.
For What Belongs to Others, those questions are unusually sharp: When does curiosity become care? When does identification become appropriation? Can Kasia imagine a future that no longer depends on somebody else believing her invention?
A deeper reading: belonging requires other people
The title allows two related meanings to coexist. Things belong to people through ownership. People belong through relationships that require recognition from someone beyond themselves. Kasia’s predicament exposes the distance between those conditions: occupying a space cannot guarantee a legitimate place in another person’s life.
My interpretation is that the premise makes personal transformation inseparable from responsibility. A new self cannot be measured only by how differently it feels from the old one. It also has to be measured by what it asks of others, what it conceals from them, and what it is willing to give back.
That is the question worth carrying beyond Warsaw’s award announcement. A borrowed identity may help Kasia imagine change. The harder possibility is a life she can acknowledge as her own—and allow other people to judge with the truth available to them.
Original content by this site's editorial team. Published: October 20, 2026 at 10:55:17 PDT (Los Angeles time)
