[1][2] The screenplay is based on Jerzy Stawiński’s novel Six Incarnations of Jan Piszczyk (1959).

[5] Bad Luck reflects the episodic source material by novelist Jerzy Stawiński from which it is adapted.

Jan Piszczyk is petty bourgeois Jew and son of a Warsaw tailor.

The story opens when the middle-aged Piszczyk is laid off from a job, and bemoans his fate.

He provides a retrospective on his life in a series of flashbacks, spanning the history of Poland from the rise of fasict anti-Semitism during the 1920s to the postwar Stalinist period.