Still from Nightwalk (2020). Courtesy of Miu Miu
For the 19th instalment of Miu Miu’s female-directed Women’s Tales series, the Italian luxury house tapped Polish Filmmaker Małgorzata Szumowska to tell a story. In her short film Nightwalk, Szumowska focuses the narrative around two young people, living at home and balancing opposite visions of gender dysphoria with their parental expectations, set in her home country of Poland.
“The inspiration for Nightwalk is my friend Filip Rutkowski,” Szumowska says in a statement “He’s genderqueer, and he expresses himself by wearing women’s clothes. In Poland—a conservative, Catholic country—Filip is extremely brave.” In contrast to countries that have made significant moves to include LGBTQ+ communities in recent years, such as Northern Ireland, which legalised gay marriage in January, large swatches of Poland have gone so far as to declare themselves ‘LGBT-free zones’.
While Szumowska’s other films such as Elles (2012), starring Juliet Binoche, feature cutting dialogue, Nightwalk is told without words to a soundtrack of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. Like the other chapters in the Women’s Tales, the film features wardrobing by Miu Miu.
Watch “Nightwalk” below: