‘You lack both beauty and talent. Your intellect is annoying. The only thing you have is your name.” That’s the skinny, delivered by her own mother, on future Polish ecologist hero Simona Kossak, who died in 2007. The pigtailed pioneer is an unlikely subject for a pithy and unexpectedly appealing biopic, carried by a charismatic performance from Sandra Drzymalska (previously seen in Jerzy Skolimowski’s donkey odyssey EO). It even manages to make studying the foraging habits of the European roe deer seem vaguely rock’n’roll.
Having several generations of famous painters and writers behind her, the Kossak name is a heavy load for Simona to carry. But with the family living on the bohemian fringes of communist Poland, she rejects all that to conduct zoological studies in the Białowieża forest. Assigned to research roe deer while living in a remote lodge, she initially believes she has an ally in her supervisor Batura (Borys Szyc). But this primeval ecosystem is under threat from loggers, so she finds herself under pressure to falsify that the animals are eating the new pine saplings used during replantation – thus justifying a nationwide cull.
