Factory worker Filip Mosz (Jerzy Stuhr) is a nervous new father and a doting husband when he begins filming his daughter's first days with a newly acquired 8mm movie camera.

He starts to neglect his responsibilities to his family as his attention fixes on Anna Wlodarczyk, an attractive, self-described "amatorka" (amateur) who encourages Filip's filmmaking, on the activities he films, and on the world of cinephiles.

The Kraków TV station airs Filip's film about a dwarf working at the factory and another about misallocated town renovation funds.

The clip turns out to be misinformed and results in the dismissal of one of his supporters from his job, an unfortunate consequence of his uninformed reporting, the Party's secrecy, and Communist Poland's culture of censorship.

In his review in The New York Times, Vincent Canby argued that much of the film "means to be uproariously emotional, but the events we see seldom justify all the overwrought reactions.

Mr. Kieślowski also appears to suggest that art—in this case movie making—must be a process by which the artist consumes the raw materials of his experience and then spits them out as finished art, leaving the people around him in the state of gnawed beef bones.

"[5] Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader wrote about the film "Suffused with Kieslowski's dry wit and intelligence, this early feature provides an excellent introduction to his work.