Weronika Mliczewska: Child of Dust

This film has toured to festivals all over and won several awards. I was in the international jury at WatchDocs in December 2025, where it took the first prize in the National Competition. No need for me to repeat wise praising words of the jury, so here they come:

“It is an emotionally moving, multidimensional, intellectually ambitious, sharp social criticism, at the same time intimate and taking on public, private and political issues, talking about a historical issue but also extremely relevant. It’s a movie about how long the teddy bears are — it touches several generations every time. It’s a story about a moving absence of a father, about racial discrimination, and about a system that, although it seems to try to save a man, abandons him back to fate and separates him from his family again. It’s a visually beautiful image, with tenderness following the hero’s long and painful journey to regain his identity, sense of dignity and peace of mind. Tears of sadness and tears of joy of Mr. Sang, the extraordinary hero of the movie “Dust Child” directed by Weronika Mliczewska, will stay with us forever.”

… though I don’t understand the sentence a movie about how long the teddy bears are, please help me,,, Anyway what moved me mostly were the scenes with Sang and his grandchild, who loves him and wants to fly with him to America. These scenes are full of love, they are true documentary moments, that’s why I chose the photo above, where Sang is cutting the hair of the little boy. The story itself is more or less predictable, we know it will be more than difficult for Sang to settle, he does not know how to write in Vietnamese and now he is to learn American. The film captures that in an excellent way. And for the story it is of course a scoop that the American family has a lot of problems; the father, Sang’s father, comes out sympathetic but had not really been a father for his American children… oh yes, as someone has put it, “family is the worst institution we have invented”. Thanks to the daughter in the American family Sang gets a place to stay and a job, and the father comes to visit. Sang stays in America, he wants to give the little boy a better life than the one, he had growing up in, in Vietnam without a father. The director has tread carefully towards her protagonists, not easy I guess. She is not pointing fingers, leave it to the audience. Thank you! The music… a matter of taste, for me too much here and there. Conclusion, impressive work, for brain and heart.

Poland, Sweden, Qatar, Vietnam, Czech Republic

92 mins.

❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️