Daniel (Bartosz Bielenia), a 20-year old criminal offender, experiences a spiritual transformation in a juvenile detention center. His dream is to become a Catholic priest, but his crime prevents him from applying to the seminary. But Daniel has no intention of giving up his dream – instead of working at the sawmill in which he is sent to work as a parolee, he pretends to be an ordained priest. As such he is allowed to minister in the parish of a small town still recovering from a tragic accident in which many local young people perished.Corpus Christi is the third feature by Polish director Jan Komasa. In this movie, he touches on subjects of true faith, sacrifice, and spiritual redemption. Besides deep intellectual analysis, the film offers strong direction and beautiful visuals which are obviously based on the world-famous traditions of Polish cinema.Inspired by true events and written by Mateusz Pacewicz, the movie opened in Poland, which is a deeply religious, Catholic country, with a big bang. In just the first ten days of release there, 488.463 people went to see the movie despite its controversial story. Corpus Christi reached a milestone of half a million tickets sold on the first Monday after opening weekend. It is too early to speak about the final result, but the expectation is that it will exceed a million viewers – a huge success for a domestic film and an art-house picture at that.

The rights to this Polish drama have now been sold in dozens of countries. Among them are France, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia as well as many countries in Latin America.The picture was accepted to compete for the 2020 Foreign Language Golden Globe and is this year’s Polish entry for the Academy Award in the Best International Feature Film category.