“We can do quite well in suffering; it’s a very comfortable condition,” Bartosz Bielenia says about his role as the character Daniel in Jan Komasa’s film Corpus Christi, Poland’s Oscar candidate. “Plunging into pain, into constant mourning and into never-ending tragedy can give you a lot of pleasure. Daniel tries to shake people out of this condition. He says: ‘Understand and forgive.’ That is – process it, forgive and let it go. He has a mechanism for it,” Bielenia tells Jan Pelczar.

Jan Pelczar: Daniel, the character you play in Corpus Christi, deceives people by pretending to be a priest, but he has inside him an openness that lets him do a lot of good. The audiences confirm it: we’d like to have that kind of priest.

Bartosz Bielenia: That’s nice to hear. That’s how we built that character. We wanted to show somebody who sincerely, on the basis of a system of values he saw somebody had, builds his own vision of the world, naive but also beautiful. And he shares it with other people. If it works, if it resonates with the viewers, if it brings joy and encourages reflection, that means we’ve achieved something.

To what degree is acting for you something like being a priest is for Daniel? You were seven or eight years old when you started to appear on the stage in Białystok. The inspiration for the figure you play in Corpus Christi – i.e. the hero of Mateusz Pacewicz’s reportage – was also fascinated with the church from childhood.

It’s true, I started early,