The association between Karol Pałka’s debut and Maysles brothers’ emblematic “Grey Gardens” is inevitable: both films follow the tensed relationship of a mother and a daughter who live together and have voluntarily exiled themselves at the periphery of the society of their fellows, while the protagonists are simultaneously dependent on and exasperated by this reclusion. However, while Big Eddie and Little Eddie represented two instances of the failure to reach the pinnacle of artistic and social success, a humiliation which brought on their decision to withdraw from the limelight, Danusia and Basia seem utterly immune to the temptations of modernity and, in consequence, show no attempt to catch the eye of the camera. The old lady and her middle-aged daughter neither flaunt, nor dissimulate their precarious living conditions in a shack in rural Poland; they take care of their animals, replenish their supplies at the village store, quarrel, and cultivate their secret gardens - one populated by spirits, another one built around a man Basia talks on the phone with, who sends her a cassette player, but never comes to visit her. The filmmaker is determined to see some kind of pantheistic sublimity where others would see squalor, dullness, or even the grotesque; and nature, sometimes grey and frosty, and other times blossoming, is not some random background, but the very matrix of this existence which unintentionally defies the dominant civilizational model. (Liri Alienor Chapelan)